2006-06-20
Well, I do exist – if only sporadically.Sometimes I feel like I’m reaching that age when the distant past seems to have more resonance, immediacy, than the present. Saturday night I found myself in a reverie that was taking me back to a teenage party sometime in the mid 1970’s – not one of those fumbles at someone’s house while their parents away. This was a properly organised disco in the church hall of a sleepy village – litre bottles of cider, cans of lager, twiglets, Sweet, Slade and Ziggy Stardust. I had my eye on one particular girl whose name I’ve long forgotten. She was pretty, she had a nice body, nice smile and of course I’d never spoken to her.
As would be expected the girls danced, the boys mostly didn’t. I was one of those that did actually enjoy it – especially the thumbs-down-the front-of-the-flares dance to Mud’s Tiger Feet – and was up there well before the grab-some-flesh for the slow dance at the end. But I danced with girls I knew, girls I wasn’t really interested in.
I joined my mate Paul near the stage. He was sucking on an orange which he’d injected with vodka before the event: ‘Seen your girl? She’s up dancing.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Over there – have a laugh at that!’
She was up dancing. And it was comical. The girl had absolutely no sense of rhythm. She wasn’t even dancing the off-beats; she was just randomly dancing. And she appeared to be conscious of not catching the beats and tried a few claps but missed the beat with those too. Paul and I laughed, cruelly, till our eyes were streaming and I lost all interest in the poor girl.
‘She’d be terrible in bed! You’d keep falling out when she pulled when you expected her to be pushing!’ It’s a theory I’ve stuck with (although let’s face it there hasn’t been much chance to test it) – good on the dance floor, good in bed. A woman who can let herself go and move her body when she’s up strutting her stuff, she’ll use her body like that when it gets intimate. And the woman, however gorgeous, who just makes the perfunctory steps – she’ll just lie there and wait until you’re finished.
Tell me if I’m wrong.
What brought this to mind on Saturday was being at a kind of re-run of the seventies night – a charity disco Lynne and I had been invited to with a group of her friends. Until the dancing got under way I wasn’t really up for it but two or three bars of Brown Sugar had me up there Jagger-ing away like a teenager’s worst nightmare of your-Dad-at-the wedding. Oh, yes. I get embarrassing.
Dancing along side was Lauren, my age, nice figure despite that, sensuous movements, and in my mind (and untested) good in bed. Which is very sad as her husband is far down the steep slope of MS and the reality of her bedtimes is wiping his bottom and heaving him out of his wheelchair.
So I got to thinking – if rhythm is something you’re born with, and assuming that my correlation between dance and sex is right – does that mean good sex isn’t something you learn, it’s just something instinctive?
And - this is where I stray into the slightly uncomfortable area. Every year since she was five Catherine has taken part in a show with her dance school (she’s fourteen now). For the last ten years we’ve gone along and watched perhaps a hundred girls from five to fifteen perform an assortment of tap, jazz, ‘modern’ and traditional dances. My daughter does multiple dance classes a week so she gets to do at least three numbers. As far as I can tell there’s no quality control – if you turn up for the rehearsals (if your Mum thinks it would be a good thing to do and pays for it and takes you…) you can be in the show! And quite right too. Two things popped in to my mind last night: firstly the worst thing you can do for a child is let her get fat (whatever age they are podginess in a leotard is horrible). And secondly? Even at five, definitely at ten and most noticeably at fifteen, there is a huge disparity in the way females are able to use their bodies. In dance at least.
And me? Once I get going I can dance all night if you want me to. My style and technique might be a bit upright and rigid, but I can sweat and sway with the beat.