Something Better

As Lent slowly creeps forward, I miss dancing. I think back especially to three fun evenings listening and dancing to live jazz bands and watching the flying feet of Balboa aficionados. Balboa is obviously great fun, but it is a huggy dance. It would be a tough sell to my merry band of moralists. I pondered inventing a kind of Balboa in which the partners are at least a hairsbreadth apart at all times, but the internet informs me that “connection” (that is, body-to-body touch) is crucial for both leading and following.

At times like this, I have to recall the principal goals of Mrs McLean’s Waltzing Party, which are 1. to strengthen ties between Traditional Catholics through social dancing and 2. to offer us something better than contemporary forms of entertainment. When tempted to reorganize my work schedule to take an evening dance class–or to try out a weekend workshop in Glasgow–I ask myself if this would help towards these goals. Usually not. Balboa–alas!–may fall into the same camp of uselessness. Lindy Hop is sufficient for the goals or, if it is inadequate for fast jazz, Charleston or Collegiate Shag might be the modest alternative.

One of the merry band reminded me last week of one of the Somethings Worse: commercial dance clubs. Two or three years back, I entered into a friendly spat in the parish hall kitchen: two slightly older girls were cajoling a younger girl to come to a dance club with them. She had never been to a dance club and did not want to go. And I, who started sneaking into clubs at 17 without ID (fake or authentic) and spent my 36th birthday in Savage Garden, backed her up.

I had not yet read Peter Kwasniewski’s Good Music, Sacred Music and Silence, which convinced me that music controls how we think and feel and thus what we become. (And the hero of High Fidelity, a book and film very much of my generation, asks, “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”) Thus, I wasn’t even thinking of the music. I was thinking of the clubs themselves and how, the last time I was in an Edinburgh club, my friend Clara and I were followed from room to room by what looked like an uncle-and-nephew team on the prowl.

But not only Edinburgh. There was also the Boston pub where a bespectacled Irish roofer attempted to grind on me, and the drunk young man in Toronto who grabbed my hand and placed it on one of his comedy breasts, and the pair of girls who made out on the floor of ‘Velvet Underground’ as a circle of men, silent and unmoving, stood around and watched.

There was also the club in Hamilton, Ontario, where I went (age 27) after a particularly miserable day to drink alcopop, zone out to industrial music, and hope nobody noticed I was alone. Nothing bad happened, but it was a stupid thing to do. Fortunately for me, I discovered somewhere better to escape loneliness: a café frequented by other young wannabe writers and artists. As far as I can recall, the Catholic Diocese of Hamilton offered nothing in the social sphere to assuage the loneliness of twenty-something singles.

It did not occur to me as a child and a teenager reading about exciting nightclubs in newspapers and magazines that they might be part and parcel of the glamour of evil. (In fact, today we might sniff for a whiff of sulphur emanating from anything we think glamorous.) “Glamour” can be synonymous with deception, and commercial discos are totally deceptive. They look like elegant caverns of sparkling lights and romantic mist, but if you stay until the lights come on (as I have done too many times) you discover nothing more than a pock-marked warehouse with a dirty floor and wires dangling from the ceiling.

In contrast, the parish halls and ex-churches in which MMWP has our dances are exactly what they look like. They are as beautiful in the daylight as they are in the evening. Here is where our Easter dance will be:

Nightclubs are also deceptive in that they hold out the hope that you might meet handsome and amiable strangers. However, as I have illustrated above, you are more likely to encounter lasciviousness and drunkenness, and when the lights go up, beauty flees, leaving pale and sickly faces in its wake.

In contrast, at a well-regulated dance sponsored by aficionados (like Scottish Country Dancing enthusiasts) or a Catholic diocese, you will indeed meet (relatively) handsome and amiable strangers, even if some are more socially awkward than the heroes or heroines of your favourite books.

Nightclubs are also deceptive in that they seem to offer safe thrills. Indeed, they are so safe that they require a team of bouncers and also bar staff trained to recognize damsels in distress. Helpful signs in the WCs remind punters not to leave their drinks unattended, lest someone spike them with date-rape drugs. Sometimes kind women identify local rapists by name in marker pen on the toilet stalls. And cab drivers almost never attack the women who get into their cars outside these clubs.

In contrast, well-regulated dances require only a brace of mothers or fathers, backed up, perhaps, by a pair of Polish basketball players, to ensure the safety and comfort of all. Everybody knows almost everyone else, and strangers are introduced to each other, or are encouraged to introduce themselves. (Dance cards are very helpful here.) Alcohol is not necessary to dull nervousness and boredom, for nobody is nervous or bored among friends. Meanwhile, in excess, it prevents the correct execution of dances, so many simply avoid it.

In conclusion, well-regulated dances are so much better than visits to commercial nightclubs that I don’t even need to discuss the cultural and moral superiority of traditional social dances over freestyle wriggling. My only regret is that I cannot offer such dances once a week. However, I do know a splendid place where some lovely traditional Catholics dance the Lindy Hop some Friday evenings, so if you are interested in joining us, let me know.

(The top photo is where MMWP usually offers dance lessons and practice.)