THE HAPPY HOOFER

Don Chesshir two-stepped away from his three-piece life ten years ago and has been happily doing the shuffle ever since.

Once a bored vice-president of cost accounting for one of Dallas’s largest and most influential banks, Chesshir now teaches dance at least three nights a week and hosts numerous dance parties around town for singles’ groups. His repertoire includes Forties ballroom, Fifties rock, Sixties Watusi, Seventies touch-disco, Eighties freestyle (“hot spot North Dallas dancing”), and timeless country and western dances. Chesshir estimates that he teaches at least 200 students a week, and so far in his dancing career, he’s taught more than 12,000 new hoofers.

Most of his students are single, and Chesshir, also single, likes it that way. “It’s a good way to meet other singles,” he says. His students come from all walks of life, from real estate tycoons to company clerks, young and not-so-young, but once the music starts, social differences are checked at the door. After each class, Chesshir and his students head out for a nightclub to practice their fancy footwork. For Fifties and Sixties, it’s Studebaker’s; the C&W fans rotate among North Dallas’s most popular country clubs, with Thursday nights exclusively reserved for Borrowed Money. On those nights when students show up to party after class, so do former dance alumni.

Touch-disco and freestyle dancing, Chesshir says, aren’t drawing the crowds that (hey used to. Consequently, his students are concentrating on jitterbugging and country two-stepping. There’s twice as much interest in C&W than anything else, he says. “Country and western dancing typifies Texas,” he says. “By learning C&W, students who have moved here from other states can feel like they are partial Texans.” Also, he says, C&W is more versatile than other types of dancing. “You can incorporate other moves into C&W easier than you can in other dances.”

Does Chesshir ever miss the hum of computers or the ranks of gray flannel? “Never,” he says, and adds that he’ll dance as long as he can. Apparently, he’s planning on a long career. In addition to his busy dance schedule, he’s also organized a weekly tennis group for singles for “fun and to stay in shape.”

Chesshir, forty-five, is also negotiating with C&W boot, hat, and jeans manufacturers to sponsor the first “Waltz Across Texas.” a statewide C&W dance competition. Preliminary plans call for the finals to be held in Dallas November 6-8.

For more information, call 445-3200 or check out the latest Fun/Ed catalogue, which lists class schedules for beginning and intermediate classes.