By Susan Anspach
I’m not a great dancer. That has yet to stop me.
For a wedding, my husband and I recently traveled from Manassas to St. Louis, Missouri. It was a young wedding and our first in a while, which is to say the dance floor was lively and hard to resist. Plus we’d flown quite a ways, so we felt like we’d earned it.
My husband and I danced to one song, then another. Then he left for the bathroom, leaving me somewhat on my own, though not exactly so—lots of people were still shuffling and bopping about all around me. And the night was young. The music fine. I thought this was the perfect occasion to seize the hackneyed advice and dance as though no one was watching.
Later, it turned out, they were in fact watching. Quite a number of people were watching me, closely.
My husband has a more conventional dance style than I do. That is, he has a style of dance. Other people might look at my husband and say, “That man is dancing,” which is more than they might say of me.
It’s hard not to take issue with this because of the two of us, I’m the one with more classical training. It so happens I’ve been dancing since I was 5 years old, when an elite handful of us got to skip the second half of our nap to have our feet forcibly shaped into the first through third positions in the school multipurpose room. Our teacher was Miss Jay. She wore a frown and a blunt bob and grunted when she bent over to correct the spacing of our heels. Collectively, we captured the essence of grace.
My study of movement didn’t stop there. Sporadically throughout grade school, my parents enrolled me in such advanced dance training as Tumbling I and a single tap class.
After a while, the classes fell off, bizarrely enough, since dancing, or some derivative thereof, took on new meaning and weight in the years spanning middle school through college. That was the Era of Dance, when it suddenly seemed of crucial importance to impress members of the opposite sex with our shy, shuffled steps into the Osbourn High cafeteria girls’ room.
Opportunities to dance have fallen off some in recent years, or so it seems. Short of weddings, I don’t dance much anymore. Maybe my energy’s not what it used to be, or my inhibitions snuck up on me as I got older. Does it really require the illusion of being invisible for me to dance in the company of other people? I don’t think of myself as a person who holds back, and yet. (At home we do dance, mostly to help our baby fall asleep. She likes waltzing best, but we’ll fall into a smooth jazz step, should the mood strike.)
My sister-in-law, who belly dances three nights a week, serves as a clear exception to the rule—as do the ladies at my gym’s Zumba class, shaking it nightly. At that same gym a class offering is listed as Baby-Wearing Ballet, which is exactly what it sounds like: a line of grim-faced mothers doing their utmost to plié without letting their kids’ heads topple over the rims of their Baby Bjorns. Bless their hearts: Those women were exhausted before they pulled into the parking lot.
My husband has talked about enrolling our son in ballet, though he’s never once mentioned it for our daughter, for whom he has big plans with krav maga. He says dancing is in both our kids’ bloodstreams: His parents were the suave ’70s types to enter dance competitions and win. He’s old-fashioned, my husband, but not discriminating: He has both taught my son’s day care the Texas two-step and lent a hand to the fallen on the mosh-pit floor at death-metal concerts.
In all likelihood, we’ll let our kids pick their own activities. As eschewing as we are of gender stereotypes, I expect the day’s coming when our son will want to play T-ball, and that there will be a time when our daughter wants lessons in dance, and we’ll get them for her.
My friends with older children warn me about that.
According to one of them, a mother of an 8-year-old girl, the culture of dance classes has changed since we were in them. Gone are the days of the multipurpose room smelling vaguely of nachos, of the recitals where we wore T-shirts we had tie-dyed at home. This friend, Ellen, thought she’d do the nice thing and volunteer to organize the purchase of the class’s recitalwear. Big mistake, she told me. Don’t get involved with the clothes. Overnight, her inbox flooded with the opinions and nasty counteropinions on jazz-dancing ladybugs versus jazz-dancing butterflies.
No problem, I thought. I have time before that. There are 7 1/2 years between Ellen’s daughter and mine.
Not so fast, said my friend Morgan. She, too, found herself snared in a clash over dance fashion: Not wanting to spring for the requested (expensive) blue tutu, she sent her daughter, Leyla, to perform in a green one from home. By the next day she’d received no fewer than four text messages from other parents less than pleased with her self-righteous mutiny.
Leyla is 2 years old. The recital was at 1 o’clock on a Tuesday. There were eight people in attendance, and they sat on the floor.
Is it possible I’m in the wrong camp? Leyla could have a rich and famed career as a ballet dancer ahead of her—some girls do! Some boys, too. (The gender neutralist in me cannot quit.) Maybe Morgan should take her position as nurturer of the next generation’s Anna Pavlova more seriously.
I do have a friend named Susie who grew up to be a dancer. I monitor her on social media with a close eye and slack jaw. It doesn’t seem like people could actually live the way she does, making a living the way that she does. One of these things is not like the others: mechanic, taxi driver, real-estate attorney, danseuse.
She’s a lovely girl, Susie, with a sloppy ponytail and a great laugh. That much I can say about her. What can’t you say about her? What is Susie’s je ne sais quoi that separates her from the rest of us ungraceful plebs? You just can’t see Susie learning dance in a room smelling of corn chips and artificial cheese. You don’t imagine her photograph popping up on three separate social media sites after a wedding where she cut loose to a little Taylor Swift—or maybe you do, but not in the way it happened for me.
Susie is elegant.
Susie can dance.
I can dance, too, though since that night a few people have suggested otherwise. But my toddler son tolerates my spins and leaps with him across the floor of our living room. There are evenings when only my ¾ step can get my daughter to nod off.
And if my husband looks better dancing than I do, then at least I have him for a partner—one who believes, like I do, in girls playing with bulldozers, in boys who glitter-paint.
On the dance floor, though, I have to give it to him: The man knows his trade. His is a mean two-step. It would be folly not to let him lead—at least until the heat cools off some on Instagram.