Prom Queen For A Day
…
cause all she wants to do is dance
And make romance
Never mind the heat comin’ off the street
She wants to party
She wants to get down
All she wants to do is -
All she wants to do is dance
All she wants to do is dance
And make romance
All she wants to do is dance
From “All She Wants To Do Is Dance”
Performed by Don Henley
So You Think You Can Dance
Well, as a matter of fact, I do a better than average cha-cha and a serviceable waltz, both courtesy of a year of lessons at the Pink Barn Dance Studio in Tulsa when I was 13.1
Otherwise, I am not a dancer. Beyond fulfilling my spousal responsibilities (e.g., ethanol enhanced rug-cutting at weddings, hospital sponsored Christmas parties, and similar festivities) and sporadic episodes of private dancing safely secluded at home, I am confident that I can count all my choreographic exploits as an adult on the fingers of one hand - and still have enough remaining digits to flash an obscene gesture at anyone ridiculing at my inept attempts to trip the light fantastic. Concerned readers may now dismiss their fears that this second post (see Thanks For The Dance ) about dancing in three days presages a prolonged sequence of American Bandstand-inspired entries.
Julie,2 on the other hand, would have met the Hall & Oates criteria for Maniac Dancer.3
The Celebration
After Julie underwent her first set of operations and completed her first course of chemotherapy, her cancer went into remission. It was not until much later, however, that the signs and symptoms of her disease were absent long enough that we no longer assumed every instance of fatigue, unexplained tenderness, transient weakness, or any of the dozens of ordinary physical complaints most adults endure in the course of a day signaled the onset of an exacerbation of her cancer.
Once I ceased such psychological flinching, I was [choose one or more of the following] lucky, inspired, wise, intuitive enough to throw a celebratory bash for her. I was at least smart enough to limit my contributions to insisting this would happen so Julie didn’t have to make a self-serving decision, throwing sufficient money at it, and showing up as her escort.
Julie’s best friend and my psychiatric group’s business manager handled the logistics with consultation from Julie. We ended up with 200-300 guests, including Julie’s family, at a hotel ballroom with loud music, free food and drinks, and the other necessities for a party, including at least a couple of crashers whose exile from the festivities was commuted by Julie on the (apparently) inarguable grounds that “they seem nice enough and they do like to party.”
The key to Julie’s revelry, however, was her assumption that, as Prom Queen, she could (and did) demand dances from whomever she liked, whenever she liked from the time the music started until the hotel refused to grant further extensions on the rental of the ballroom, regardless of how much I offered.
That’s Julie in the graphic below, dancing with her Dad.
Footnotes
- When not box-stepping or cha-chaing my way across the dance floor, I still, in fact, dance much as I did in the 8th grade:
- Pull the woman’s body close to mine
- Shuffle feet aimlessly in 3/4 inch movements
- Move hands from starting point on her lower back in gradual descent until she objects (one of the advantages of being an adult is that this maneuver provokes far fewer objections from grown women than it did from 8th grade girls) or reaching anatomical regions that led to remonstrations from the Phys Ed teacher chaperoning the Eli Whitney Junior High School mixers
- Julie Showalter was my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily sexy wife and prize-winning writer, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. There are many other posts about her and her writing in this blog. For information, see Julie Showalter FAQ↩
- Julie was also taken with the notion that dancing was the vertical expression of horizontal desires. At home, she would frequently start singing, apropos of nothing, a 1920s ditty, I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, while executing an exquisitely provocative, excruciatingly salacious, way past suggestive shimmy that was so inevitably effective as a bedroom invitation that it could have been the embodiment of the hackneyed joke that Southern Baptists were against sex - because it might lead to dancing.↩
