It’s Christmastime in the Suburbs

One might not anticipate a rousing night at the Elmwood Community Center, a squat, middle school-esque brick building in the West Hartford suburbs. I surely did not expect much excitement when I tagged along with my aunt to a holiday party hosted by her senior center’s line dancing class.

Missing the more manageable Syrian winter and unacclimated to the stinging, bitter, New England cold, I miserably tread as quickly as I dared across the icy parking lot with my coat collar pulled tightly around my numb ears and heaved the double, fall-out-shelter-weight, metal doors of the community center shut against the piercing wind. Before I had a chance to enjoy the relief of warmth I was assaulted by a tide of blaring Christmas music with a Latin beat. The Macarena flooded the empty expanse of linoleum at maximum volume. Younger than most by half a century, I suspected I was one of the few people in the room who could without difficulty hear the music pouring from the speakers.

Stark fluorescent lights showcased a gaggle of girls aged six to twelve in identical dazzling glittery dresses and tights running around without abandon between the stage and the clusters of card tables on the sides of the vast space. One of these girls would occasionally pause from sliding across the linoleum and perch on the edge of a folding chair long enough to send text messages on her brightly colored cell phone. I learned she was the daughter of one of the dance teachers, a perky woman with a long straight blonde ponytail and thick eyeliner who strode around clapping her hands, trying in vain to convince the throng of preteens to sit and be still while she encouraged the octogenarians to get up and dance.

At that point I steeled my reserve to not take up my high school friend’s mother’s well meaning suggestion that I move back to Idaho and teach ballet classes. It had crossed my mind as a backup option when she had exclaimed, “Melodee is retiring! Now no one in the whole area is teaching dance. You would be so good at it!” Melodee, who curiously enough also sported a long straight blonde ponytail and a hefty dose of perkiness, taught ballet for years in a studio in her basement in the middle of the windswept prairie near the Nez Perce Indian reservation. I took class with Melodee for two years, during which time I frequently misspelled her unique name when making out checks, and was often forced to drive the forty-five minutes across the prairie in a blinding snowstorm (…uphill both ways…obviously). One night I recall feeling the rear tires slowly slide out of the straight tracks left by the last car. It was impossible to discern the edge of the road through the infinite polka dotted blackness and snow flurries, but with resigned anxiety I felt the car glide left then right then around in a slow circle before I felt it gradually slither off of the road into a ditch. I recall waiting on the empty road with, well, my coat collar pulled tightly around my numb ears against the howling wind for an interminably long time before another car ventured across the lonely prairie.

Something told me that Elsie might appreciate this story. Talking above the Macarena and Jingle Bells, my aunt introduced me to her line dancing partner Elsie. Elsie was a spry ninety year old woman originally from Kentucky. I admired her style. She was wearing heels and black stretch pants, and had bright orange hair. She had also brought her own bottle of wine and was drinking it out of red plastic cups while she surveyed the dance floor. Though a botched knee operation that she hadn’t allowed to heal properly had forced her to switch from salsa to line dancing, she proudly told me that she continued to split her own firewood.

At the next table was a more uptight looking woman. She wore her gray hair in a high tight bun and a gray shirt with a high tight collar. Her skirt was more colorful but garishly patterned and reached to her ankles. My aunt giggled and asked me sarcastically, “Who invited the refugee from Bavaria?” Then she turned and introduced me to Charlie, who was actually a priest. “But,” my aunt confided somewhat gleefully, “His favorite song in our line dancing class is ‘All My Exes Live in Texas!’”

The evening was already more amusing than I had predicted when George Clooney waltzed across the linoleum and extended his hand to me. “Would you care to dance?” he asked me, while I blinked and realized that he was not actually George Clooney but the other dance instructor, a devastatingly handsome man with perfect posture, salt and pepper hair, and astonishingly similar to George Clooney. Or, perhaps everything is relative. He led me to the center of the dance floor and I smiled as a Christmas rhumba started and we spun around and around the other couples. Inspired by the George Clooney look alike’s strong hand on my back I diligently turned into him, away from him, and around him. I confessed that I had no idea what I was doing, mostly for something to say, true as it was. The great thing about a proficient lead is that if a woman can keep her back straight and her shoulders down and her eyes trained on his eyes, he can make you look amazing. Ginger Rogers famously said that “women have to do everything that men do, except backwards and in high heels.” I love this phrase and I love that at least while dancing women get the credit for it, whether or not they deserve it. When the rhumba ended I thanked Mr. Clooney of the Arthur Murray studio, and as I ambled back to my seat next to Elsie I realized that the audience was whistling and clapping.