And Then We Danced

by Henry Alford

  But, obviously, the more I danced with the group, the more joyful moments I witnessed, too. At one class the final song was an acoustic version of “Over the Rainbow.” I was sitting next to Erica, a newish recruit to the group who had a lot of restless energy. Erica had a difficult time following any direction or playing the pass-the-gesture game, preferring instead to snap her fingers; if you danced up to her on the floor, she’d look down at the carpet and keep on finger-snapping.

  The music had a calming effect on her: her fidgeting subsided, and she stopped surveilling the corners of the room as if waiting for a friend to show up. As the song played on, her eyes started to well, and she sang along, as a few of us had started to do. When the music ended, she threw her arms around me and hugged me.

  I’d had the hardest time coming here because I didn’t want to feel pity for people who certainly wouldn’t want that. With Erica’s arms around me, however, I found myself enjoying the moment much more than I would have thought I could.

  But it took me seven months with the group to see that I didn’t keep returning to the class for this kind of moment. No, the moment that kept pulling me back was the one when dragged-into-duty Leonard had given Karen the finger. I couldn’t shake that image from my consciousness—not because it was darkly comic and odd and I’d told all my friends about it, but because it seemed like a monument of something. A monument of having a fuck left to give.

  * * *

  The winter proved especially hard for the group, and the ranks temporarily thinned. A wonderful Caribbean woman we’d all loved dancing with had sustained a knee injury at home. Another dancer got an infection while traveling. Tony G. slipped on the ice and fell backward and hit his head.

  We wondered if we’d see any of them again. The lessened energy in the room was palpable; it was hard, while shimmying to some burbling Frank Sinatra number, not to think about the missing members and wonder how they spent their Fridays now.

  One Friday at the end of March, nine of us had just seated ourselves in the chairs on the dance floor at the beginning of class when I noticed two of the women smile and start rustling in their seats. I followed their line of vision and saw that Tony G. had finally returned after a few months’ absence, his wife in tow. His senatorial good looks were still there, but now the bug-eyed expression that had been an occasional feature on the landscape of his face was a permanent one. Gone.

  The music swelled, and we started dancing. All of Tony G’s coiled energy was still in evidence, but he seemed to be looking through people rather than at them. At one point he wandered outside the circle of chairs, whereupon Jason, who was teaching that day, gently guided him back into the circle.

  A few minutes later, Tony G. fell. He’d sat down for a spell during the dancing, and when he started to stand, he collapsed forward onto his knees and cried out, “I’m a baby!”

  He wasn’t hurt, but his wife flew over to him, and she and Jason nimbly helped him up while his eyes darted all around him as if in search of someone who might have pushed him.

  Falling down was a very rare thing with the group—I’d only seen one person stumble, but not fall entirely. It took us all a song or two to regain our momentum.

  Twenty minutes after his fall, Tony G., back in the fray on the dance floor, was wandering around the circle distractedly. When our gazes crossed, his eyes and nostrils flared.

  I reached out and took both his hands. I ever so slowly lifted the fist sandwich of my right hand and his left hand up to the level of our shoulders; then, as we lowered these hands, we lifted our other ones at the same glacial pace.

  Tony G. smiled wolfishly, so I decided to add legs: as we arched our arms up into the air, we’d accompany them with the corresponding leg, which we could both get to almost knee height.

  I noticed a few of the other dancers staring at us admiringly.

  After Tony G. and I had done six or seven arm-and-leg lifts, he let go of my left hand and proceeded to twirl 180 degrees. At the end of his twirl, I became aware of the fact that I was taking in the rear view of Tony’s still-stylish haircut, and I remembered the Einstein quote about an infinitely powerful telescope showing the viewer the back of his own head.

  Tony G. twirled around to face me and we continued our dance.

  Maybe we should try to do slo-mo for the rest of the class, I thought. Maybe we can slow down time.

  EPILOGUE

  I WAS AT A GLITTERY Manhattan party, the kind where you find yourself thinking, So that’s what a cable news anchor looks like when devouring an onion puff. Lurking among the hordes was a bright-eyed young balletomane acquaintance of mine, who, to greet me, elegantly stretched her neck to the left and right of my face like a cat smearing a branch with its scent glands.

  She asked what I’d been up to, and I told her that I’d been doing a lot of contact improv and ecstatic dancing, and, indeed, had just finished writing a book about same.

  She nodded her head. “Is the book . . .” she started to ask, a look of pained exhaustion passing over her face, as if we were talking about knee surgery, or about how so many male rock-and-roll vocalists, when singing, sound like they’re trying to open a jar.

  “. . . funny?” she finished her question.

  In the heat of the moment, I chalked up her air of disdain to her Yankee air of overly practical unflappability—Oh God, you’re not going to try to do jokes, are you, how unattractive.

  But on further reflection, it struck me that what had fueled her faint displeasure was less flintiness or snobbery than our friends, the Functions. Were we able, in the manner of lab coat–wearing neuroscientists, accurately to pinpoint and analyze what forces draw this woman to the world of ballet, I imagine we’d find that 70 percent of her MO is bound up in a quest for prestige. And why not? People in the ballet world are engaged in a five-hundred-plus-year-long struggle to maintain something exquisite and endangered, and if you can’t feel a little proud about such a mission, then why live?

  I’d attribute the other 30 percent of her interest in ballet to a desire to meet and mingle with VIPs and chic people. Again, totally legit and understandable—recently I walked through a crowded lobby of a ballet’s intermission and enjoyed thinking, I bet Famous Actress over there is complaining to Famous Architect about the rapidly decaying patio he built her.

  But neither of these quantities are ones that get me up to Lincoln Center these days—or to a jam or a Broadway show or the sticky and pockmarked nether regions of a grubby little dive bar in Baltimore.

  As if the fact that the world of dance is composed of lots of little tribes weren’t enough to subdivide all us dance lovers, here come those nasty functions to push us further into our own pens. Sure, ask a dancer or dance enthusiast about an idiom that is not his or her preferred one, and that person will blithely tell you “All movement is movement.” But out on the street, you hear a different tune. The twerkers sometimes look askance at the bunheads; ain’t nobody in the ballroom or hip-hop circuits gonna indulge me in my lamentations about the rigors of Zumba.

  So, too, with the functions—a person drawn to dance as a form of rebellion might have very little truck with, or knowledge of, dance as a medium of religion or social entrée; people who like to watch feats of dancerly derring-do sometimes as dancers themselves radiate derring-don’t.

  On the bright side, however, the fact that dance serves so many gods—the fact that it is so eminently porous and adaptable—means that there are a million entry points for those of us drawn into its orbit. And who’s to say that obsessing over the fantasy dance sequences on My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is any more or any less valid than, say, driving your nephew’s color guard squad to St. Louis, or devoting all your free hours to learning how to samba?

  I hope my odyssey as recounted in these pages reflects this. Certainly it reflects the idea that what dance provides you, or what it means to you, is always shifting—if it helped me to ease into my sexual orientation in my twenties and to reduce work-related stress
in my forties, for the past three years it’s been my Saturday playdate. (I recently found myself telling an acquaintance, “I dance on the weekends. I’m a ‘gentleman dancer’—which is not code for ‘Edwardian male prostitute.’ ”)

  Now that I’ve written this book, dance is increasingly an excuse to travel, or to pause while traveling. Greg and I have thrilled to flamenco in Spain, tap dancing in western Massachusetts, and ballet in Miami. I’ve done ecstatic dancing or contact improv in Boulder, Seattle, Oberlin, Ohio, and Portland, Oregon; in a park under the Brooklyn Bridge, and in a parish hall three blocks from the Supreme Court. Am I turning into one of those perpetually tanned, artsy-fartsy women who wear six hundred silver bracelets and are always talking about their house in Santa Fe? Yes. By day. By night I am a wizened eighty-year-old shut-in who wants nothing more than to soak in a hot bath of Epsom salts and then put an ice pack all up in his “area.”

  Sometimes people ask me if I’m a better dancer as a result of all the dancing I’ve described in this book. It is both hilarious and ironic to me that, the last two times I did contact improv prior to sitting down to write this epilogue, I was given corrections by partners, a rarity among social dancers, particularly ones who aren’t beginners. (One partner exhorted me to “Breathe!” and another said of my ham-handed attempts to lift her, “Less grabbing, please.”) Apparently being a more confident dancer doesn’t make you a better one, it just makes you a more vivid one.

  In the end, maybe how we dance is just as important as why—how passionately, how often, how unguardedly. How, it seems, can topple why. Which takes me back to the beginning: three hours after I interviewed the Stanford dance historian Richard Powers about the benefits of social dancing, I went to watch him deejay a totally delightful weekly social dance called Friday Night Waltz. Held in the ballroom of the First United Methodist Church in downtown Palo Alto, Friday Night Waltz weekly draws hundreds of Bay Area folks for waltzes, polkas, and mazurkas. The crowd is diverse: I talked to shy Stanford students, charming Silicon Valley geeks, ebullient local longhairs, a cheery twelve-year-old girl wearing a lot of purple, an elderly Asian woman. One eighty-five-year-old participant—a former Hewlett-Packard engineer named Barry Lewis—had driven three hours for the event. When I asked him what attracts him to dancing, he explained, “It was either this or join a motorcycle gang.”

  The mood in the room was joyous; to see a gathering of people slough off the worries of the workweek is to witness a much lovelier and gentler version of the body-morphing segment of a superhero movie.

  I thought that all the good vibes on display could not be beat. But, around 10:30 p.m., as I was saying my goodbyes, I saw something—or, actually three somethings—that delighted me even more than all the bonhomie swirling around the dance floor. I stumbled onto them by accident when, exiting the ballroom and moving into the vestibule, I turned my head to look down the hallway. They were there, leaning against the wall, nestled amid all the other accoutrements—bags, water bottles, knapsacks—that you’d expect to see at a dance.

  Two pairs of crutches and a wheelchair.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  HUGE THANKS TO MY EDITOR, Karyn Marcus, and to Jon Karp and David McCormick. This book would not exist without you three.

  Any mistakes or faults herein are my own, but thanks to people who commented on early drafts: Jess Taylor, Greg Villepique, Jenny Weisberg, Ann Earley.

  Molto molto grazie, Laura Marmor, Stuart Emmrich, Aimee Bell, Robin Goldwasser, Stephen Williams at Noho Pilates, Rob Spillman, Norton Owen at Jacob’s Pillow, Camilla Ha, JP Eltorai, Elisa Rivlin, and all the folks at Simon & Schuster, especially Anduriña Panezo, Rick Willett, Martha Schwartz, Julia Prosser, and Elizabeth Breeden.

  I’m honored to have taken classes with, and danced with, Elise Knudson. And thanks to all my indulgent contact improv dance partners and colleagues, including Lucy Mahler, Tamar Kipnis, Gabrielle Revlock, and Emily Moore.

  But my biggest thanks, of course, go to Greg. I literally couldn’t have done it without you.

  I lost two great ladies during the writing of this book. Rest in peace, Jocelyn Easton Alford and Susan Leroy Merrill. I miss you madly.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © GREG VILLEPIQUE

  HENRY ALFORD has contributed to the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker for two decades. His books include How to Live and Big Kiss, which won a Thurber Prize for American Humor.

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  Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Henry-Alford

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  ALSO BY HENRY ALFORD

  Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?: A Modern Guide to Manners

  How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth)

  Out There: One Man’s Search for the Funniest Person on the Internet

  Big Kiss: One Actor’s Desperate Attempt to Claw His Way to the Top

  Municipal Bondage

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  Copyright © 2018 by Henry Alford

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  Certain names and characteristics of fellow dancers and acquaintances have been changed whether or not so noted in the text.

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2018

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  Interior design by Carly Loman

  Jacket photograph by Tony Rusecki/Alamy Stock Photo

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Alford, Henry, 1962– author.

  Title: And then we danced / Henry Alford.

  Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017044367| ISBN 9781501122255 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501122262 (trade paper) | ISBN 9781501122279 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Dance—Social aspects. | Dance—Humor. | Dancers— Biography. | Alford, Henry, 1962– —Humor.

  Classification: LCC GV1588.6 .A44 2018 | DDC 792.8—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044367

  ISBN 978-1-5011-2225-5

  ISBN 978-1-5011-2227-9 (ebook)