On the Campus - February 25, 1998

On the Campus - February 25, 1998

EXCLUSIVELY ONLINE:

Swing is Back: Learning to Dance Like My Parents, by Kelley King '98

Past editions of On the Campus, Online

Swing is Back Learning to Dance Like My Parents BY KELLEY KING '98
There was a point in my early adolescence when the sound of a bass guitar tuning up struck the same chord within in me as an organ at a funeral procession. I would be working my way through a filet of something or other at Table 19 at a wedding reception, scowling because the dress my mother made me wear was itchy as well as ugly, when the band would take its place at the helm of a frightfully central dance floor. My eyes would roll in dread because I knew my mother had been waiting for this moment since the benediction at the church two hours earlier. Not 30 seconds after the first bars of "Shout" carried through the room, my mother, accompanied by my all-too-willing father, would pounce on the vacant square of polished wood. They did the Stroll, the Swim, and the Bristol Stomp, the Frog, the Monkey, the Funky Chicken. By the third set, a ring would inevitably form around my dad, who would literally spin on his back in a move he simply called the Turtle. On such an occasion, at an age when I believed that my parents' prime motive was to mortify me in public, it would have taken a seismic blast to make me get up from Table 19 and shake a tail feather. It wasn't as if every school dance found me in the last row of bleachers with my head between my knees. But up until college, I perceived a major difference between my way of getting loose and grownups' way of making fools of themselves. Basically, my girlfriends and I all danced en masse and our technique consisted of a lot of jumping around in our stocking feet. The only exception was when the DJ cued up "Stairway to Heaven" and forced us to find a boy taller than ourselves with whom we could perform the mechanical sway for an agonizing seven-and-a-half minutes. After observing a similar scene at one bat mitzvah, my parents were incredulous.	ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS BROOKS '97
Who is partners with whom? my father demanded. And what do you kids call this crazy step you all do, the Hop? My mother wanted to know. In the voice I had reserved for my parents and children whom I baby-sat, I explained that we didn't fast dance in pairs, and we didn't, for heavens sake, do steps. Just wait until college, my parents would say. But like my mother's frequent promise that one day I would not only want to wear high heels but be able to walk in them, this comment I wrote off as preposterous. Although I knew that college parties would be different than mixers in the school gymnasium, I knew that the days of wearing crinoline to spin round at frat parties were long gone and that radio announcers with names like the Boss with the Hot Sauce were long dead. At the beginning of my freshman year, I approached the average Saturday night on Prospect Avenue confident in my ability to Hop, and not expecting to want to do much more in my four years as a Princeton student. Little did I know that Princeton teems with people who love to dance in ways that require not just basic coordination but skill. And their spirit is infectious. In venues both organized and informal, Princeton students are imitating those who roamed campus before the age of CDs, Heavy Metal, and New Age Angst. Swing, and the big band music that inspires it, is back. Be he painfully shy at mealtime or chronically obnoxious in class, the fellow who can swing and dip a girl with ease has the ability to become a Midnight Casanova. In the basement of an eating club on a weekend night, he is coveted by the ladies and secretly envied by the guys who gather in corners to nurse or plow through endless cups of beer and ridicule. I remember one evening my freshman year when I tired to keep pace with an upper-class Casanova, who became quickly frustrated with my tendency to become entangled in his gangly arms. I was quickly deposited with a kindly smile and a fresh drink and a replaced with a veteran of the system, a tall and aloof senior, to whom moves like the pretzel were child's play. TANGO, SWING, AND THE HUSTLE To my relief, I discovered that many of my peers were not the dancing autodidacts that I had suspected them to be. Sure, after a few years of roving through the bowels of an eating club with the means to hire a good band, one is bound to pick up rudimentary twirling. But, and I am sure this comes as a shock to everyone, a large percentage of Princeton students hail from the world of cotillion and debutante balls, in which a teenagers survival is contingent on a command of the Viennese Waltz. But for those heathens who are only trained in the art of dancing with thyself, the Princeton Ballroom Dancing Club offers classes with such exotic names as Argentine Tango, West Coast Swing, and the Hustle. Lessons are led by undergraduates as well as professionals that are imported from area studios. One of the club officers produced some outstanding figures: over 400 Princetonians signed up in the fall for information about classes. At intermittent hours of the evening, one can walk past the frosted pane glass windows on the west side of Dillon Gym and hear students giggling their way through the Rumba or apologizing about trampled toes. Many students, claimed the officer, go on to intercollegiate competitions in pairs dancing. But the rest of the members of the Ballroom Dancing Club are simply out to try something new, and perhaps, find a way to impress their friends at winter formals. The movie Swingers, currently a ubiquitous feature in a dorm-room video collection, climaxes with a scene in which the chronically jilted Mike shows up his lady-killer buddies by making the dance floor of a nightclub his dominion and a nimble-footed Veronica Lake-look-alike his lady of the manor. Guys in the '70s no doubt harbored a secret wish to be Travolta; now they want to be like Mike. DOING THE DORKY Like using an umbrella, and wearing high heels for that matter, pairs dancing turned out to be just another dorky thing that my parents have always done, and I, since being at Princeton, now do. Today is my 22nd birthday. At this rate I should be using shoe trees and buying in bulk by the time I start my career. The last wedding that my family attended was my sister's, last spring. Between dancing a jitterbug and a modified tango with my father, I didn't have time to worry about the fact that he might be embarrassing me. I was mostly concerned with being as good a partner as he was. I thought he might like to see that complex theorems and a mastery of the inverted essay are not the only fruits of a Princeton education. If given a couple of cocktails and enough space, Kelley King's latest dance triumph is what she calls "the worm."

paw@princeton.edu