Too Fat To Fly

 Long before I was shamed by the comely Peacock sisters into doing the Hokey Pokey -  to put my backside in and shake it all about -  I'd developed an almost pathological aversion to dancing. When the lights go down and the band strikes up I've been known to break out in a cold sweat, regarding the gleaming floor with the dread of the aquaphobic dragged out reluctantly for a day at the beach. I'm at a loss to explain this; perhaps it was an early exposure to dancing lessons, where bossy girls wore white, cotton gloves and the atmosphere of fetid air and good families hadn't changed since Edith Wharton's day. Maybe it was the Eighth Grade dance in the winter of 1968, where just showing up with a date at all after eight years in a boys' school was an achievement in itself. I managed to convince a girl named Gordon to come with me; she lived next door to the school and was notorious for raining sodden rolls of water-logged toilet paper down upon us as we waited for the bus. At a basement dance-party festooned with black-lights and Peter Max posters some months before, I'd had my first official slow-dance with Gordon to the dulcet strains of “Inagodadavida”, which I remember pulling off without discredit – despite that tricky bit during the drum solo - and actually enjoying. My school's choice of what must by then have been the very bitter dregs of the Lester Lanin Orchestra to get us up and dancing that night may have contributed to my future reluctance; they opened with “Tuxedo Junction” and went south from there. If there were opportunities to dance during the following four years spent incarcerated in all-boys boarding schools, I've blocked them, save for the one made memorable by the Headmaster's address the next day to the full student body which began, “Sex, it appears, has reared it's ugly head once again....” , a titillating but thoroughly improbable notion, given that the girls were complete strangers, had been bussed in and spent the evening lining the walls in tight, aloof clusters.

    

Brian taught tap-dancing in the loft next to ours above the porno store on Snow Street. Three or four afternoons a week, without warning, all Hell would break loose when Brian dropped the tone-arm down on an old 78 of “Life Is Just A Bowl Of Cherries” and his ten or twenty students would commence an attempt at synchronized tap. This ponderous gavotte might go on for hours and sooner or later I'd find myself trying to follow his prompts, at which display my roommate would invariably pipe up, “You should dance tonight in the Tap Room....”. The utter anarchy of trying to dance to the rhythms of Patti Smith or David Byrne kept me off the floor in college and the onslaught of Disco and The Bump pretty much sealed the deal. But on those evenings at the Tap Room given over to live music, when Scott Hamilton's Quintet or Roomful of Blues were swinging in the cramped corner, when the thoroughly eccentric piano-man known only as Sweet Pea would play piano for wine, Brian and April would show up, dressed to the nines and clear the dance floor. Like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, these two would slide out among the peanut shells to hold the floor all night without breaking a sweat or rumpling a perfect crease. From where I stood, exhilarated and envious, it seemed they must have been born to this as I, clearly, had not.

   My daughter, Zinzi, got married last year. While Suzanne spent much of the time leading up to this event immersed in details, I quietly agonized over how I might handle the inevitably required ritual dances. Whereas the very idea of a tango with the groom's mother left me breathlessly chagrined and mortified for months in advance, even the prospect of staggering about with my long suffering bride seemed impossible. In my rich imagination, though, in day after day of exquisite fantasy, I pictured myself holding my beautiful, radiant daughter as we danced perfectly, effortlessly to “The Way You Look Tonight” while the assembled guests looked on, hushed and envious of our amazing footwork. 

   But that was just my imagination. The DJ surprised both of us with Blossom Dearie's “Rhode Island Is Famous For You”, a tune so up-tempo, so thoroughly devoid of dance-ability that even Brian and April might have sat it out. In fact, that three minutes of flailing about seems, in retrospect, so ridiculous, so akin to trying to herd a group of tyros through a tap dance that it's almost faded away, edged out by the fantastic image of the two of us swaying slowly to Sinatra that I'll treasure forever.