On the Way Out series: Dancing through life -- 3 minutes at a time -- Vol. 2, Part 10

On the Way Out series

Vol. 2, Part 10

Remembering the blues, a Little bit of country...a lot of jitterbugging...and a young man dancin' through life... 3 minutes at a time

There was a time in a land far away. Sorry that's a different story.

Not so long ago, say sixty years ago, I started dancing through life -- three minutes at a time. I tried hard to recreate what that was like in a book that I released five years ago called The Dancer. I changed a few things in 2020, during the "heart" of the pandemic, well because I could, and put the little, fast-paced book back on the dance floor.

Only a select few -- probably those dancin' fools out there who love music and can loose themselves on a dance floor for three minutes at a time -- actually read it. It was the blues in particular that got my attention...well rock and roll, too...and a little bit of country.

In the book, the hero travels, with a buddy, to a hilly, forest area, just a few miles out of town to sneak into a place that they had heard through the grapevine was the place to go to listen to such music. The hero in The Dancer was, of course, already a dancin' fool and after a few hours he had picked up on all the new steps the patrons of the establishment could muster up -- there again, three minutes at a time.

Of course, it was just around the time Elvis, a swivel-hips guy out of Tupelo, Mississippi was making waves all the way from the Ed Sullivan Show to Southern California.

The movie Footloose (1984) touched on the looseness that occurs on a dance floor when a rhythmic tune reaches the turntable...and it took Kevin Bacon the better part of two hours on film to get everybody dancing...allowing for a happy ending to the film.

Dancing is not a phase for me...not something that lingers on the back burner or is gone altogether from my soul. I actually miss it and would sometime like to take a journey back in time and strut my stuff.

My problem is baseball comes first, even now at the age of 76, and if I wanted to return to the dance floor, chances are I'd have to do it on one leg, seeing as how I'm prone to have my share of injuries on the baseball field.

There are two things I was good at back in the old days -- dancing and playing baseball.

I certainly have lost some of my skills on the diamond. But, give me a break I'll be 80 years old in 45 months. Now the dancing, if I'm lucky enough to still have two feet (that's not two left feet, as they say, referring to dancers who are just starting out), when I hang up my cleats, maybe I'll rush over to the dance studios and have my memory refreshed.

I missed the 1920s, of course, while the Jitterbug and Swing dancing had a grip on the young people in the 1940s, followed by the Stroll, the Twist and one I just could never wrap my hands around the Watusi.

The Jitterbug was the one that stuck with me and will date me if I was to venture back to the dance floor.

In fact, the young people today might think I had just arrived from another planet, if they saw me making my moves.

Kevin Bacon said during the movie Footloose, there's a Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance.

The mourning part I have down pat. At my age, I have lost my mother, my father, friends and teammates. That is the naturally progression of things.

Now dancing, that's something else altogether.

Watch your step!