let’s dance (to the song they’re playing on the radio)

I went to a wedding Saturday. It was small, very elegant, and in a lovely place. Beautiful meal and tasty cake.  But what struck me sharpest tonight was an older white couple, in their mid sixties maybe, who were dancing. They were fantastic, doing all sorts of dances that I vaguely recognized but didn’t know the names of. I kept watching them, even after I was busted by each of them (twice by the man). The bride and groom were good dancers too, but with people of our generation, it seems that if we know how to dance, it’s because we were raised by wealthy parents who forced us to attend cotillion or we took some lessons for our weddings. I fall into neither category. But the baby-boomers can really shake it. They move like they’re not counting the beats in their heads, like they’re not trying to remember where to place their feet and position their arms.

I’m not usually a traditionalist. I do NOT feel that simply doing something  because it’s the way it’s always been done is a valid argument. But yet, something makes me sad about my generation’s lack of rhythm; that’s at least the case when the music playing is not Sir Mix A Lot. Is it our faults for resisting learning from our parents and grandparents? Or is it their faults for not forcing us to learn? I fear that when the baby-boomers all need walkers and/or die, that kind of dancing will be largely lost in the United States. This may be how linguistic anthropologists feel knowing that indigenous languages are dying. Sure, we’ll have the internet to tell us what the Charleston was, but you can’t learn soul and fire on the internet. (Shoot, I can’t even figure out how to crochet from books or the internet. Make a baked mac-n-cheese, sure, but movements that rely upon heart and beat? Not as easy).

Before my Catholic wedding, there were classes. A weekend retreat, actually, which relied upon workshops of varying topics (budgeting, communications, natural family planning, stuff like that).  What I’d wished we’d had was a weekend of dancing, learning with the masters. And by masters, I don’t mean professionals, I just mean people from a generation that cared about dancing as an art. Or even better– I wish that elementary and middle schools (many of which are seeing their art and music budgets slashed or destroyed altogether, by the way) could work dancing in. How do Latin American countries teach each new generation to do that? Learning to jitterbug or swing dance would certainly have benefited me more than the natural family planning class, as the only nugget I remember is that the couple teaching it had four children. I’m not going to go so far as to say that more dancing would have saved our marriage, but you never know . . .