GOTTA DANCE PART 1
It was lunch hour. I was waiting for the light to change at the corner of Broadway and 57th Street. Chase Manhattan right behind me, Duane Reade due east, I was idly panning the lower floors of surrounding office buildings-that unseen phylum of fix your fiddle, store your fur, read your palm when I spotted a small fourth-floor sign: FRED ASTAIRE DANCE STUDIOS.Incredible, I thought, the whole world gone mad, and they're still teaching ballroom dancing. In broad daylight. At high noon. On a lunch hour, maybe, Imagine. I not only imagined it, I imagined myself doing it. The genie was out of the bottle. I sprinted across 57th. I wanted to dance-a real dance with steps to music-and I wanted to do it at once.
I must have wanted to do this for a long time, maybe all my life. But how could I? Everything prevented it—the way music is, men are, what women have become. I'd been a fair dancer once —modern, ballet, that sort of thing. But Health came along and ruined all that. But Health came along and ruined all that. Dance became Exercise. And I'd never been in it for my thighs. Dancing is what you do about music, if it's in you to do it; and if it is and you don't, it becomes a blocked language, like sex. Fear arrived all cold and clammy in the elevator, What kind of guys would dance in a place like this? And what kind of woman would dance with guys like that? Panic. I needed an alibi. Too late. The doors parted. A huge wave of warm music broke over my head, lifting me from where I was and dropping me 'down to someplace new. Day turned into night. Eydie Gorme was belting out a samba.
A couple of hard-looking women in glittery pumps and practice clothes strutted past, looking like magicians' assistants. Beyond, on a large dance floor, two couples were performing extreme Latin dances with cocked hips. A well-muscled young man partnered a woman about sixty-bony in the sternum, ropy in the neck-the kind you hold doors for. Her dancing was not only beautiful, she danced as if she were beautiful. So did he. Was this possible? Didn't I know her from the express line at D'Agostino's? A slender, blond teacher skimmed across the floor with a nervous, bespectacled fellow near forty.
She danced him through her fingertips, smiling, moving as if he were doing it all. I was escorted into an office and told that I could have a half-hour evaluation for $12. I would have paid them $800 just to dance for five minutes like the lady from D'Agostino's.
To Be Continued …
Reprint from a Fred Astaire Dance Studio student by the name of Julia Whedon
