Heck Of A Guy

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

1. 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

   ↩

2. 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↩
3. 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.↩

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They have the time, the time of their life
I saw a man, he danced with his wife
In Chicago

From: “Chicago (That Toddling Town)”
Lyrics by Fred Fisher

Let’s Do The Stroll

During one halcyon period, Julie¹ and I had, instead of a house in the suburbs and two children, a 38th story apartment on Lake Shore Drive and two offices in the Loop, hers at the Sears Tower and mine in one of those Michigan Avenue buildings with a bank and a mediocre restaurant at street level and shrinks and dentists filling the offices on the other floors. Although we had, by that time, been married at least three years, we still awoke each morning moderately surprised and immoderately happy just to discover each other in the same bed.

Just after noon on a sunny spring day during this period, we were walking to lunch, my arm around her waist, on Michigan Avenue doing our best imitation of wholesome, hard-working Yuppies making their way in the big city.

Crossing the Chicago River, we were in front of the Wrigley Building on a well populated sidewalk when I spontaneously² lifted her hand over her head, twirled her in a fashion that would have won the approval of my instructors at the Pink Barn Dance Studio in Tulsa, where I took a year of lessons as a 7th grader, lowered her nearly to the pavement³ in a flamboyant dip, pulled her back to the vertical, squeezed her body close to mine, exchanged a quick kiss, and then eased on down the road to the applause of the crowd - who may have just been clapping in relief that I didn’t smash Julie’s head like a melon against the sidewalk⁴ (given that she had no inkling what was going on and was stuck with me for a partner, she clearly had the more challenging role in this performance).

I never did anything like that before, never did anything like it again. But, for one shining moment, …

The Trigger Event For Today’s Post

In the 1930s, Freud famously wrote to Marie Bonaparte,⁵

The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”

A similar query into the female psyche elicited this response from ThisIsMary at View From A Farm House Window:

True beyond water seeking the lowest level, that the sun will rise and set to rise again, true even beyond God’s great “I Am,”  American women want to have one moment in their lives when they are Cinderella at the ball dancing with Prince Charming.

And that exquisite and confident response led to me recall walking with Julie on Michigan Avenue one especially fine Spring day.

Footnotes

1. Julie Showalter was my much-beloved, fiercely smart, wickedly 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↩
2. This is especially noteworthy, given that I was then even less the spontaneous sort then than I am now↩
3. I was, one must remember, younger then and agile enough to perform athletic feats such as bending over or rising from a chair without uttering groans or wincing↩
4. I also suspect that in these less innocent, post-Youtube days, folks are so jaded that the polite reactions to that twirl and dip would be along the lines of “Is that it?” and the less genteel commentary would range from dismissive insults to scatological abuse.↩
5. Marie Bonaparte, who was treated by Freud and who paid the ransom that allowed him to to escape from Nazi Germany to England, is, I suspect, the only individual to have been, simultaneously in fact, both a Princess and a psychoanalyst. After marrying Prince George of Greece in 1907, she was thereafter officially known, according to Wikipedia, as Princess Marie of Greece and Denmark.↩

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