Grateful thanks to St. Anthony of Padua, or whomever inspired a kind person on the 26 Bus to hand my purple dance notebook to the driver. I felt excruciating loss for a few hours on Sunday evening and then an amazed burst of joy when I received word from Lothian Busses that they had my book.
This book, which is almost completely full of notes for and about all our dance parties and big dances since February 2023, is never leaving the house again. It is mostly lists of names, but the kind of thing that Scottish archivists gloat over once it is over 100 years old. After all, it contains about 235 pages of Local Social History–on acid-free sustainable forest paper, to boot.
It is also a testament that, from 2023 to late 2026, overlapping groups of young Catholics escaped the siren song of the internet long enough to take dancing lessons and/or go to old-fashioned dances. Some played instruments at these dances. Some taught the classes.
The notetaker learned a lot, too. One early page records that the reasons few ate the food offered at the first Dance Party were that one girl was a vegetarian and several boys and a girl were following Exodus 90.
“Waltzing music must improve and be louder,” says another early note, blissfully unaware of how difficult it is to dance to concert compositions compared to elevator music. (It would be 3 years before we danced to Chopin and Sibelius, and only then because the musicians confined themselves to a strict, uniform tempo.)
Another note, this time very sad (and possibly confusing to 22nd century archivists), is the quote “We were together every day for 40 years, and it still wasn’t enough.” This is what our first swing-dancing teacher Lee said about his late wife Seema at her funeral. No-one who was at their lessons will forget how amazing and fun they were.
Lee and Seema were about my age, and they were well-known in the Edinburgh swing-dance community. They weren’t Catholics, but they certainly modelled a happy marriage. Lee led dance classes with unquenchable enthusiasm, and Seema backed him up perfectly. On the dance floor they were the living embodiment of “the complementarity of the sexes.” You can read social media scoldings, and blogposts about, proper relationships between men and women all day without understanding it as deeply as you could by taking a dance class from that wonderful couple.
Learning by doing remains very important for many aspects of human life. You can learns hundreds of words and many rules of grammar, but the only way to converse in a foreign-to-you language is to have real, live conversations. Similarly, having a proper social life in the world, learning how to meet people, to make new friends, and to become an active member of a community involves going out to real, live social events. One of the splendid benefits of going to your community dance is that you have a group activity to join in: it’s not all chit-chat, as at a drinks party, or a contest, as in a chess match. Group activities, like dancing, certainly lead to meeting people and, if managed correctly, should eventually lead to making friends.
I spend more than 10 hours a day online, alas, for I am employed in a virtual workspace and I also attend language lessons through the internet. That’s one reason why getting out to live music performances, to dance lessons, and to old-fashioned Catholic dances is so special to me. Work and study done, I can return to real, embodied life and see my fellow human beings in three dimensions. This is the life all our ancestors knew–and, indeed, the lifeI knew before I got my first personal online connection in 2005.
And that brings me to how I may have lost my dance notebook on the bus in the first place. After reviewing some notes, I decided to have a look at my mobile phone instead. Somehow, I wasn’t as mindful in putting the book back in my bag as I was about taking my phone out. And goodness knows what I was that I wanted to look up on my phone, as I can’t remember now. But it is clear II was trading the contemplation of real life for some electronic ephemera.
There’s a lesson in that! So send me an email and buy admission to our wonderful Michaelmas Dance. It is taking place next Saturday (September 26) from 7:30 PM, and we have a little dance workshop this Sunday (September 20) at 2:30.