I'm de-pressed. Mr. S and I have just seen De-Lovely, the movie
about Cole Porter, and it's going to take at least a packet of Tim-Tams
to cheer me up.
I love Cole Porter's music, of course, but in my eagerness to see the
film, I hadn't focussed on the fact that the movie would be full of
impossibly elegant people, not just singing, but dancing.
I can't dance - don't ask me. To my ongoing mortification, and
despite a love affair with music that has lasted half a century, I
cannot dance.
I claim extenuating circumstances, of course.
Twenty years of piano lessons mean that my brain is hard-wired to
believe that the emphasis always falls on the first beat in the
bar. Apparently this doesn't happen in dancing. Mr. S is
continually exhorting me to listen to the back beat. What's a
back beat, for heaven's sake? I only recognise beats with
numbers, principally the number one.
I am hindered also by my inability to tell my right hand from my left,
without thinking about it for a lot longer than it seems to take most
people. I am still smarting from the experience of trying on
engagement rings for the first time, and dealing with a bewildered
sales person asking me if I really intended to wear my engagement ring
on my right hand. One of the unintended consequences of marriage,
for me, is that I have a visible, constant reminder of which hand is
which. (Just give me a minute).
And then I blame the fact that I spent most of my early adolescence in
one of those obscure, fundamentalist sects that had dancing on its
seemingly endless list of no-no's.
I was about 17 when I had my first exposure to dancing. They were
called sound lounges in those days, and Brisbane's grooviest sound
lounge was called T.C.'s (for Top Cat, y'know). The Stones were
too young to vote, and my initial observation of dancing was that the
motion required appeared to be similar to using a tea bag - much
bobbing up and down in the same place. So briefly, wonderfully, I
could dance.
It didn't last, of course. There's only a limited number of
places where bobbing up and down still counts as dancing, and most of
them don't encourage baby boomers.
After 25 years of marriage, Mr S has learned how to man-handle me
around the dance-floor in a reasonable approximation of the two-step,
but I can't waltz, can't fox-trot, and as for all that Latin stuff, I
get exhausted just thinking about it.
We have a collection of videos that Mr S bought in the hope that I
might eventually learn to cha-cha, or line-dance, or whatever, but the
instructions invariably involve lots of moving to the left, or the
right, and I never know if they mean my left, or his left, and by the
time I've thought about it, Mr S is weeping with frustration, and the
band has literally moved on.
Ginger Rogers did it on high heels, and backwards. The woman was a genius. Sigh.
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Change of Life 
