Actually, I was probably a terrible dancer. Never had to learn. Never had to lead Dorla. She knew what fit with whatever wiggle I was putting on and did it. How could I dance with another after her? I can't. I don't. Dorla felt like Ariel. Every other woman feels like an elephant. At least on the dance floor. I've danced with other good dancers. The exercise certainly gives them delectable bodies. Great legs, great tush. But they still feel stiff and clumsy to me. Doing things by the numbers.
I remind myself of something I read about Chaplin written by his son Charles Junior. Charlie Chaplin had a male attendant: valet, cook, butler ... The attendant guessed perfectly what Chaplin wanted time and again and had the needed thing there without having been asked. Charles Junior says that after a while Charlie would think he had asked for it. One time he balled the guy out for serving Swiss pancakes when he wanted Swedish. "I told you ..." But he hadn't: hadn't told him anything. Dorla was like Charlie's valet. And I was too spoiled to develop independently as a dancer.
Hell, I'll segue into a story about Dorla: another heroine there's no reason not to name: nothing ever happened. On second thoughts, I squeeze an intermediate story in first: the preceding explains the next, the next explains the following: or makes explanation possible.
Ninth grade or so I hear that there's going to be some dixieland jazz at the local volunteer fire department. Oh boy, I go. Even with standing room only I saw a couple start to dance, demanding and getting an extra inch of space for their movements. I became smitten by a woman near by. She may well have been married, she may well have been a mother. I asked her to dance anyway. She accepted.
And SybaRight went c-a-r-A-z-y. I ignited into a frenzy of gyrations. My ankles, my hips had never been more fluid. By my own lights I was dancing as well as I ever had. The more impressed with myself I became the more uninhibited became my undulations. When the number ended I expected her to throw over whatever life she had to hurl herself at me. But no: she scowled at me, and moved to another part of the hall.
I went after her. "Don't you want to dance the next number with me?"
"No," she said, and moved away again.
I was devastated. I've had short love affairs in my life but that was by far the most abrupt to that date. But the young woman relented. She turned toward me again, leaned her lips near my ear. She said, "A man who dances well lets the woman do the showing off: he's there mainly to support her dancing."
A neighboring file speculates on why this star of the school-gymnasium-turned-musical stopped dancing at so early an age. I explained how my dance partner Dorla's puberty paralyzed mine. I neglected to mention this additional humiliation as a reason.
I stopped dancing partly out of abashment for being such an obscene showoff.
Dance Partner
I'm in maybe the ninth grade. Dorla and I have been invited to dance together on the stage a couple of times. When she's hired as the entertainment for the prom at some other school she invites me as her escort. She brings her own music, comes out in her little costume, does her number. The rest of the time I'm free to sit with her, hold her hand, dance with her. When Dorla and I danced, others stopped and watched.
Charleston
In fact, back up a minute. I'll tell how we met. It's so awful to be a sixth grader. Like cattle in the pen. Dance class is offered. The box step. The one, two, three waltz. The teacher shows us a basic Charleston step. Then a few frills. OK, he said once some number of us had gotten it a little bit: now, loosen your ankles. Feel the rhythm. Relax. Move your body. I did. You've got it, he said to me. Jesus! You've really got it! He was the dance teacher, but no way could he do what I was doing. I hadn't listened hard to Kid Ory and Satchmo for nothing.
In the seventh grade my Morris School class moved into the Junior High School which at the time shared the same building with South Side High School. Other grade schools had more room and kept their seventh graders. But we all trucked off to one so far away it was almost in another town: for a "dance." All the boys go to one side of the gym. The Morris School/Junior High boys clump together. All the girls, probably similarly clumped, are on the other side of the gym: boys and girls mutually repelling. The adults put on some music. The center of the gym floor might as well have been the Neffu Desert. But why should I describe it? Your first dance was probably very similar. In the above respects at least. After a while a few couples paired up. Not me, so I don't know how much adult manipulation was involved. After a time the adults put a Charleston on the record player. More and more of both boys and girls had apparently decided that they weren't mutually poisonous. More kids were dancing to the Charleston than had responded to any of the fox trots, lindeys, or waltzes. One of my Morris School fellows apparently knew some kid from one of the other schools. My kid must have been telling their kid that one of his kids could really do this. Their kid runs off, telling my kid to follow with his kid: me. Bewildered, I'm dragged out into the middle of the floor. The other kids comes back, dragging an adorable girl by the arms. They shove us together. Dance, they command. This girl, Dorla, wouldn't you know, and I start to Charleston. Everybody else stops dancing. The adults stop the record and restart it. Dorla and I restart. This huge circle forms around us, everybody clapping and whooping.
Now that I recall that time in alphanumerics, there's something I don't understand about it. Dorla was at least a couple of grades behind me. I'm telling this as a "seventh grade dance." Maybe the host grade school whose gym we were hauled to allowed more than one of their grades to attend. Anyway, if there was a dance, Dorla and I always took each other. After a year or two I started taking her to an occasional movie as well, walk her home, hold her hand.
Neighborhood
But: you must realize: she wasn't from my neighborhood. She wasn't in my "society." I never took her up on my garage roof. She never told me she wished everyone else were dead. Besides, by that time I had this wholly embarrassing, totally bewildering thing between my legs: a thing that wouldn't behave itself. I never knew when it was going to rear up. So far it hadn't spit at me: hadn't spit at anyone. I didn't know it could spit. But I knew enough not to trust it.
A little kid's body has no secrets. Society just covers it up anyway: practice for adulthood, train the pup to the collar. But this new body of mine did have secrets. This body did need to be covered. At least so long as we're all determined to be neurotic.
OK. So Dorla and I have danced together for years. Dorla and I have had circle after applauding, awestruck circle form around us. We're old hat at South Side, but it routinely happens at other schools in other towns where she's the entertainment. Also, by the time I'm in the ninth grade, kids are supposed to be getting good at a thing or two. Never again would quality be a revelation like it had been at that first dance. Dorla and I have been invited onto the stage at South Side, performed, went back to class. My French Class made a fuss: for one second, then went on with the French.
Dorla wants to work up a new routine for herself. She invites me over to her house to help choreograph a routine for her using Slaughter on Tenth Avenue for the music. She knew I loved that music. Sure. I don't know anything about choreography, but ignorance has never stopped me before. I show up. Her parents let me in, say Dorla will be right down. I hear the shower turn off. I look up the stair well, see Dorla scamper into the hall wrapped in a towel. A minute later she comes down the stairs wearing a gymnast's top and some kind of terry cloth panties that fit her buttocks and crotch like paint. Dorla had been flat as any little girl when I'd first been shoved against her. Sure she had good legs, and a round butt. She was a young girl. She was a dancer. What I was seeing come down the stairs however was something I wasn't prepared for. I froze.
Dorla was cute from the start but was soon to become beautiful. I too would come to look ... uh, a bit less freaky: but here I could pass for Mad's Melvin Cosnowski (later known as Alfred E. Newman). [graphic not loading at the moment]
She takes me into her practice room. Polished wood floor. Clean, polished, and shinning. I never saw that room except in that condition. She gave parties there. I don't know if furniture or a rug ever covered that floor on other occasions. Dorla puts on the music. I see Gene Kelly as an apache dancer in the movie. I see the girl with her dress slit up the thigh. Dorla tells me that she wants to start her routine sticking her leg out from behind the curtain. She wants to hold it there for a long time, give the audience a good look. It's hard to hold her leg out straight like that. She needs my help to take some of the weight off. I'm supposed to stand next to her, hiding behind the curtain as it were, put my hand between her legs, help her hold her leg up. I look at her crotch. So soft. Immaculate terry cloth. I can see her labia, her whole vulva. Never seen one before. My little girls never stuck their leg out. Something is leaking down the inside of my pants. Hold my leg out, she says. Don't be afraid. I'm paralyzed. I don't know what I said. I don't know if I said anything. The brows on Dorla's perfect china doll's face knit. Finally I went home. I could never go near Dorla again. Oh, we danced together a few more times, but they weren't dates. At this moment I can see her coming down the stairs in her little terry cloth panties. Legs, a crotch, an ass of utter perfection. I'd realized for the first time that she had developed boobs while I wasn't looking. Within a year to two she'd have one of the best sets at South Side High. Other guys, I heard, but not me, were playing with them.
Even before she got the great tits, Dorla could be pretty sexy.
I'm not the first kid to have played naked with more than one girl. How common is it though to be traumatized once sex turns into the possibility of Sex? If you know, please tell me. I don't know. I will venture a guess however that it is not uncommon: one of several typical scenarios.
After my trauma at discovering that my dance partner had become a bomb shell, the confines of my neighborhood "society" reversed itself. In high school I'd find more than my share of maturing pussy and tit to play with, but always far afield. My teen intimacies were with girls I'd meet at church camp, girls who lived in other counties, girls as far away as Manhattan. Not only girls from my section of My Street but all girls from Rockville Centre had become taboo to me.
I'll have to come back sometime and link to comments I've already made about not dancing while listening to jazz: confusions of puberty also had something to do with seating this champ.
In Highlands Hammock, 2002, I met with a friend to try my life's first Tai Chi Chuan form. It's months now since I stopped chewing tobacco and my belly is growing disgustingly. I've never felt so fat, weak, or clumsy. My friend surprised me a year or two back by telling me that she'd been studying Tai Chi. I don't know how surprised she was when I told her that an old college classmate of mine had become the first American student of Cheng Man-Ching, as far as I know the first Tai Chi master to come to the United States, that I'd seen Cheng and visited his dojo a number of times. Yesterday I recalled for her my astonishment on one of those visits that there seemed to be no discomfort on anyone's part when the couple of female students "pushed hands" with the male students. It was hard to believe I was in the United States. My God! His forearm could brush her breast! (Of course I wasn't in the United States: I was in New York: on Canal Street: in China Town.)
My friend played disingenuous: Look at skaters, she said. Sure the guy holds the girl over his head by the crotch: but they don't teach that to every sixth grader. Only a few show biz types are excepted for that behavior.
Bulgarian skaters, March 2005
Then again, although my friend is an adult, she is much younger than I. Something happened after the 1950s that's very different: I don't mean that we're really very different but that we think we are. Our attitudes about the perpetual segregation of the sexes, even in the midst of integrating them, are different. In my day, no male-female friendships formed in the church or the school: we were integrated physically but not socially.
2008 update: I'm dancing again, regularly, for the first time in over half a century! I don't remember more than two steps. People are exclaiming how good I am anyway. Of course I've still got strong legs, grace, athleticism, rhythm ...
Details will come.
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