Good Clean Fun

I want to know how to dance. I don't mean out on a Saturday night with all your girlfriends, shaking your bodacious booty's around your shoes and handbags, with your hands in the air like you just don't care. No, I mean what my grandparents call "proper dancing".
I watched the scene from Michael Cimino's film, Heaven's Gate(1980), where the recent graduates of Harvard University's class of 1870 whirl the women present around the lawn so effortlessly it was as if they were floating on air. I had no idea what dance they were twirling across the grass, but it got me thinking about waltzing and foxtrotting and quick-stepping. Other than competitive dancing, ballroom dances don't seem to have a place in our society any more.
Hundreds of years ago, ballroom dancing was for the wealthy, the elite, the upper crust members of the population, while the poorer communities would frolic to folk music without much structure. Although this dissociation of dance dissolved in the early to mid 1900s, with dance halls all over the country and with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies making ballroom dancing fashionable, it seems that other than ballroom dancing at a competitive level the masses are more interested in "dropping it low and shaking it on the flo'". Our new version of the folk dance with ballroom dancing now a fierce sport where if you aren't good enough, there is no point of doing it.

The New Folk Dance

Don't get me wrong, I love nothing better than getting a bit tipsy and hitting the dance floor to shimmy and shake to all the songs in the charts. I just think that I'd like to experience the wholesome fun that my grandparents seemed to enjoy so much, dancing with a partner in town hall to a band, as a bit of a change to the drunken, sweaty mess that looks back at me from the mirror after a particularly energetic night out.