bei mir bis du schon
it was almost 10 years ago now and i was barely 16. about 6 of us piled into the minivan that i borrowed from my father and we hit the road for the 2 hour trip up to green bay. i had met the other 5 passengers just a few months prior, and they were all around 5 to 10 years older than me, but it never seemed to be an issue. we had started hanging out these few months quite regularly and had grown closer over the last few weeks. there had been parties and road trips and lessons and performances and practices and lots more parties. we all lived within an hour or two from eachother, but my other teenage friends were amazed that i even knew people from other schools, much less from other cities over an hour away, much much less older kids who weren't even in school anymore. but when i got together with this crowd every weekend, age and location and gender and background and any other barriers just melted away and we would dance.
dancing was what brought us together. dancing was the reason i would dream at night. dancing became how people knew me at school and why people noticed me at parties.
sometimes we would rent big banquet halls and invite a few hundred friends. we would don our fedoras and spats and suspenders and chains and look for the most vintage tie we could get our hands on. the girls would shop for days looking for the perfect vintage dresses and match their hair in the puffed up 1930's curl. and we would throw on some cds and everyone would dance.
the faster our feet were moving, the louder the crowd would applaud. the gasps of breath were audible whenever we would catch our partners out of the aerial toss we had just thrown them into. heads were sweeped across the ground just inches from doom, before being quickly uprighted on spritely feet. and it all ended with a quick suspended dip and then a bow.
this was something no one had ever seen before. no one younger than our grandparents anyway. this was something almost completely unknown at the time. there was no gap commercial selling pants with our music. there was no big bad voodoo daddy on the radio. there were hardly any swing concerts to go to. and if there were, they were down in chicago and at lesser known clubs. yes, this was the year or two right before swing went mainstream. before it went pop.
six of us friends drove up to green bay that night, where we met a few other friends because we were all asked to perform in a commercial. it was a public service announcement, 'swing against road rage' or something terribly cheesy like that. a camera crew captured us all doing our best tricks in front of a swing band and an old collector's automobile. i would eventually see the commercial run on tv once and even as a trailer before a movie at the theatre. driving home that night, sweaty and tired, trying to keep the car on the road during one of the worst wind-storms i'd ever been in, i realized this would be one of the best nights of my life.
not long after that, gap swing would hit. swing was on the radio and at all the big concert halls. twelve year old girls claimed they knew how to do it. and almost immediately, it became very uncool. now it was a fad. it was trendy. and every last one of my friends stopped dancing.
but over the last 10 years, i found myself unable to give it up. i started teaching my younger friends and formed a swing band in high school. senior year we played for my battle of the bands and some of my friends performed some fancy flips and dips while we played a medley of swing songs and we took first place. in college i would go on to teach swing dance classes of 40 students or more through the university dance program, though i was a computer science major. i kept going to clubs that survived the fad, so that even as swing died out completely, as every fad does, i had something to latch onto. and though it's usually at least a month and sometimes 3 or 4 months between dances, we still go out wherever we can find a band. the trendy preteen dancers have all disappeared again, and left us the floor.
so i was reminded of all this last month when i was asked to go back to green bay to perform again. the old crew is all gone, married, moved on, and literally scattered around the globe. but the new swing crew, the friends that i've taught over the years or who have taken lessons on their own, a bunch of them are quite good. so just four of us this time, made the road trip up there to perform our flips and jumps and spins and dips and other tricks for a fancy banquet/dance and to keep the dance floor occupied for the entire night.
here's a link to a dance troop (not us) doing a routine that gives you an idea of the kinds of moves we were going for: Lindy Hop
it's flash video, so the download is fast, but here's a dial-up version: Lindy Hop (small)
i have no idea why there's a guy in a towel at the end of that one. we didn't have anything like that. maybe we should have. my favorite move to perform is the one from that video where the guy jumps over the girl while she's standing up. impressive, yet requires no lifting on my part. ;)
so we danced our hearts out that night and got paid plus our dinners and hotel included but we decided to drive home that night (after my 2 creme brules) during a blizzard. i was reminded once again of the first trip, driving home sweaty and tired in bad weather with friends. this time we put on the music we used to listen to then as teenagers and remembered those days fondly as my life seems to have come full circle.
which trip was better? i can't say. you can never quite recreate a memory. the first time around for anything holds all the magic. when you try it again, even after 10 years, you can't live up to the memory you've idealized in your head. but does that mean i should have given up on this dancing thing because my youth just can't be topped? or do i keep trying to relive the past, pretending i'm still a kid into my golden years?
questions i'm not ready to answer. right now, i'm going to keep dancing.
Posted by heydomsar
2005-12-14
go back | random brainstorm | go forth
Rachel Ray - 2009-05-03
The cold wind was the reason - 2009-03-02
The Collected Wisdom of Angela Chase - 2009-02-15
All's well that ends well. - 2009-01-07
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. - 2008-10-04
