I didn’t want to go dancing, but My Fair Lady said we could bring wine, so there we were, with some friends, standing in front of a dance studio in a Richardson strip mall. One of the couples had heard about a “dance party” at their ballroom class. Altogether there were seven of us. We’d brought nine bottles of wine.
I will call the place No Mean Feet, not because that was its name, but because No Mean Feet is a great name for a dance studio and because I’ve changed another name in this story. I will call him Rick Ainsley. Rick was the affable dance instructor who had organized the shindig.
When I first laid on eyes on him, I thought we’d stumbled into a Will Ferrell movie. Rick looked about 50 and had a curly mullet. He wore a dangly gold cross earring; a black leather wristband with metal studs; and a tight, red, short-sleeved shirt equipped with more zippers than were probably necessary. Rick was tall and fairly thin—except for his impossibly bulbous belly, which made him look like he was ignoring his obstetrician’s advice and trying to carry his triplets to term.
Rick shook our hands and told us to come on in. We each paid $10 and slapped on nametags. Rick saw the wine and said to me, conspiratorially, “Right on. Let’s get wasted.” He was carrying a 44-ounce plastic Race Trac cup filled with an unknown (to me) intoxicant.
If Rick was a little hard to believe, the dance proper convinced me the whole thing was an elaborate prank. You know that scene in Animal House where the Delta boys and their dates walk into that roadside bar? It was just like that. Only instead of glowering black dudes, we found about two dozen people who were old enough to be our parents waltzing to Pat Boone—or, rather, waltzing to a guy at a karaoke machine singing Pat Boone. And there we seven stood, in our 30s, with our wine.
I had a sudden urge to pee. “Let’s go,” I said. “We just got here. We can get our money back.”
But one girl in our group was nervously laughing to the point of tears and could not be moved. And the next thing I knew, we were dancing.
The real trouble started about five songs later. Rick, emboldened by whatever was in the Race Trac cup, put on a Prince CD. Also, I think he switched genres out of deference to us. But the rest of the dancers did not dig “When Doves Cry.” As My Fair Lady and I tried unsuccessfully to swing dance to it, I saw that most of our elders were sulking in chairs against a back wall.
So when the song ended, I retreated to the lobby, thinking that would be a better place to drink wine. There I overheard a guy with four rings on his left hand tell his friend, “I’ve been waiting this whole damn time for him to play a big-band fox trot. I’ve asked him three times to play a big-band fox trot.”
At length, I went back inside to tell our group that perhaps our presence was disrupting the dance party. But, wonder of wonders, the place was hopping. And who was spinning and sliding at the front of the room, leading everyone in a line dance to Us3’s “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)”? None other than My Fair Lady. The guy with the toupee that looked like a muskrat, the woman in the brown cardigan sweater—they were all following along. It seemed MFL had brokered an intergenerational armistice over the electric slide. Maybe we could all get along after all. Now we had us a dance party.
But the groove was too sweet to last long in this cruel world. Mid-song, the music stopped. Everyone at the dance party looked over to the karaoke machine. There stood Rick Ainsley. The dance instructor.
“Okay, everyone!” he said enthusiastically. “Now we’re going to do a LINE DANCE!”
By then the Race Trac cup was empty. No one dared point out that until Rick had shut off the music, everyone had, in fact, been doing a line dance.
It was still early, but we all knew it was time to take our leave. So we seven kids put on our coats and walked out into the cool night air, glad we’d made the effort but a little sad, too, that we never got to hear that big-band fox trot.
