Throwback Thursday – Saved by The Twist

So, here we are on Throwback Thursday, where I get to post some of my old favorites from Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog.   Older Eyes wasn’t always as confident and cosmopolitan as he is at 71.  He once was a shy high school boy and an FSW.  A what, you say?  Read on – originally posted in February of 2014.

When I was a Freshman in high school, my Mother signed me up for dance lessons.  I really don’t remember how that came about.  It was true that at school dances, I was a Fast-Song-Wallflower, sitting with the other FSWs until the DJ played a slow song.  There were only two dance steps you needed to know to dance every song … Slow Dancing and the Bop.   Slow Dancing was just walking in circles with a girl in your arms … even I could do that.  The Bop mystified me.  Then again, I am to this day a deliberate learner of dance steps. My wife, Muri, could walk onto a floor and be dancing a new line dance in a few minutes while I was still mumbling, What was that fourth move? So, it’s possible I told my Mom that I needed to learn to dance and she signed me up. Possible. My Inner Adolescent tells me that she was afraid her brainy son was going to be a social misfit and decided to enroll me on her own. Surprise, surprise there was a girl from my homeroom in my dance class. Because I considered her one of the popular girls, I was embarrassed. It never occurred to me to ask myself, Why is she here if she’s so popular?

Saved by The Twist

When I was a Freshman in high school, my Mother signed me up for dance lessons.  I really don’t remember how that came about.  It was true that at school dances, I was a Fast-Song-Wallflower, sitting with the other FSWs until the DJ played a slow song.  There were only two dance steps you needed to know to dance every song … Slow Dancing and the Bop.   Slow Dancing was just walking in circles with a girl in your arms … even I could do that.  The Bop mystified me.  Then again, I am to this day a deliberate learner of dance steps.  Muri could walk onto a floor and be dancing a new line dance in a few minutes while I was still mumbling, What was that fourth move? So, it’s possible I told my Mom that I needed to learn to dance and she signed me up. Possible. My Inner Adolescent tells me that she was afraid her brainy son was going to be a social misfit and decided to enroll me on her own. Surprise, surprise there was a girl from my homeroom in my dance class. Because I considered her one of the popular girls, I was embarrassed. It never occurred to me to ask myself, Why is she here if she’s so popular?

May I Have This Dance?

I entered adolescence in 1956.   Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.   The Dow-Jones Industrial Average was at 5oo and the average house cost $11,800.   The sexual revolution was a half-decade away.  I was a skinny, shy, four foot eight teenager in a mostly Catholic town.   Girls I’d gone to school with for years were blossoming into young women and suddenly there were dances on Friday nights.  My mother, worried about me socially, sent me to dancing school where they taught me dances nobody danced, but I learned the magic words, May I have this dance?   I said it a lot, every time they played a slow song, leaving the fast songs to the popular guys who who’d learned to do The Bop at basement parties where it was rumored Spin-the-Bottle was played.   In 1959, Chubby Checker would save me from being a slow-dancer-only for life by introducing The Twist, the first of a succession of easy to learn dances for fast music.   But it was still the slow songs I waited for … after all, it was as close as I got to the prettiest girls I admired from afar in class.