Wasn’t dancing once an activity between two people?
I’ll admit I haven’t been out on the dance floor in a while but in the years since, things seem to have changed dramatically. I learned this the hard way when I took my kids to the Concert on the Lawn in Homer last month to enjoy the sun and some homegrown music with friends.
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It was an outdoor concert and it was Homer, so there were the usual solo dancers moving to rhythms that had no connection to the music coming from the band on stage. But there were other solo dancers who seemed to be able to hear the music and were trying to dance to it. I chalked it up to the music itself, which wasn’t particularly danceable. But as the bands changed throughout the day, the solo dancers continued to dominate the crowd.
The last band of the night was Three Legged Mule, a Homer band whose music is hard to categorize—fun, loud, fast-paced, folky, Russian influenced—with an emphasis on fast-paced. It might sound like a strange mix but it works, and when they started playing, the whole place started moving. Our friends were out there, some with partners, some without. My 9-year-old daughter wanted to join them but my 12-year-old son was tentative. My dad didn’t dance and I’ve never been big on it. But I’ve had a lot of fun once I got over my reluctance to get out and do it. I looked at my son and thought I might still have time to break that father-son tradition. I had to set an example, so I grabbed my daughter and jumped in.
This is when I learned firsthand that dancing is now a group activity. People were running and leaping, twirling and skipping, leaping and prancing. There also were people doing disco moves, waltzing, something close to square dancing and the old moving to the beat that I remember from the ’80s and ’90s. Everyone was smiling.
I won’t describe what I was doing—it wasn’t pretty—but we were having fun. My son watched from where he kneeled in the grass and just when I’d given up on him, he kicked off his shoes and joined the crowd.
The band started playing “Fisherman’s Blues” by the Waterboys and the already animated crowd turned it up a notch. A group of young commercial fishermen headed into the mob en masse and appeared to be trying to out-leap each other while keeping the beat. I lost track of both kids but saw their red hair pop in and out of sight among the frenzied dancers of all ages.
At some point during the melee I felt something pop in my left knee, but I had found my daughter again and we locked elbows and swung around each other. When the song was done I limped back to the blanket we’d thrown on the grass, and I sat out the last song. The kids stayed in, I couldn’t tell if they were dancing with each other, with strangers or with themselves. It didn’t matter; they were smiling from ear to ear.
A few weeks have gone by and a few hundred dollars have passed out of my wallet to cover doctor bills, x-rays and physical therapy but it’s beginning to look like I’ll dance again. That’s not necessarily a good thing but, in spite of the cost and the pain, I think there might be something to this group dance thing after all.