Jump, jive and wail, “Ouch, my back!”
By Burton W. Cole
It’s not exactly the ghost of Christmas past, but some memories do swirl around my brain. The one that haunts me the most is when my then-wife and I decided to dance.
Not just any dance. I don't dance, after all. Even if I try, gasping onlookers insist I am certainly doing something, but it isn't dancing. Seizure was their guess and why the paramedics showed up.
Despite this, there I was ready to learn. But just not any dance. She wanted to swing dance. I’d never swinged or swung or swang or whatever the proper tense is for cutting the rug.
But when she and I happened upon a swing dancing exhibition, we knew this could be the kind of togetherness project we need for our health and well-being.
I could hardly wait to learn how to roll my wife across my back, tuck her up under my arms or toss her through the air, then catch her and slide her first on one side of me, then the other.
When I told her this, she began hyperventilating at the mere contemplation of the spectacle.
We told my mother-in-law that we wanted to take swing dance lessons. "I think one of you better lose some weight or the other one of you will be throwing a back out."
I'm not sure if she was implying her daughter was a little too heavy to be tossed or if I was a little too weak to be twirling anybody through the air. Or maybe it was the other way around. Some of that swing stuff was happening so fast, I'm not sure who was throwing whom. But it seemed that with us, jump, jive and WAIL would be no problem.
Not that we expected to become expert swangers right away. I figured it would take up to two lessons before that happened.
Then I saw the one move where I saw the one woman dancer flicked one leg over her partner's shoulder, leaped into his arms, did some kick kind of thing tucking the first leg beneath her while smacking the other leg over the guy's other shoulder, and then she spun, I think behind his back, landing on the floor back in front of him, stepping right into the next beat of the music without breaking stride. That all happened in about 1.2 seconds.
That made me nervous. I mean, a guy could get decapitated out there if the jive jumped the wrong direction.
My wife said not to worry, that she couldn't kick that high. Not on the first lesson, anyway. But after that, my shoulders and back had better be ready because being dropped won't amuse her.
As frightening as that sequence is, the scariest thing is that Grandma was right. "Kids today," she'd say when I was a kid growing up in the disco era. "Your music is awful and those convulsions you call dancing don't make sense."
"It's great music, Grandma," we'd say. "And I've seen the kids dance. They've got the moves, Grandma."
"No, no, no. I don't see how you can stand that thump, thump, thump. And you call those moves? In my day ..."
I never heard the rest of the story because that's where we kids tuned her out. But it got me to thinking, if I couldn’t get down tonight, or burn, baby, burn with disco fever, how did I expect to jump, jive and wail, “Ouch!”?
Besides, I threw out my back lacing up my dancing shoes. I could wail pretty well without the jumping, jiving, tossing and kicking. Besides, did I really want to burden my grandkids with stories about how I moved in my day?
It was better for all involved if cuddled up to my ice pack instead. Jump, jive indeed.
Grab an ice pack and join Burt at burton.w.cole@gmail.com, or the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook. Wailing is optional.