Wednesday, April 10, 2019

DANCING THE NIGHT AWAY by LINDA LEE GREENE©






DANCING THE NIGHT AWAY by LINDA LEE GREENE©



The summer after I graduated from Franklin Heights High School, I went to work at the Union Department Store as a Records Clerk in its Personnel Department in downtown Columbus, Ohio, USA. I earned $50.00 per week at the start, and made it to $52.00 by the time I moved on. Located on the northwest corner of Long and High Streets, at 5:00 PM on good weather days, I walked five blocks south to the intersection of Broad and High Streets, my spike high-heels tapping and my full-skirted dresses swishing in eager anticipation of a quick snack at Jack & Benny’s Downtown Diner on the intersection’s northeast corner. Food consumed, including a piping hot cup of black coffee to keep me going, I proceeded to my night gig as a dance instructor at Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio. The studio was located on the top floor of a building on the north side of East Broad Street, a few steps east of the corner, at about the vicinity of the Rhodes Office Tower, which hadn’t been built yet. On bad weather days, I traveled the five blocks on a city bus.

This was back in the days when Columbus was a small-scale version of Memphis or New Orleans or Chicago in terms of its music and dance scene, interspersed with a business and government sector as serious as it gets. North and south, and east and west, smoky nightclubs pulsating with live music from both local and out-of-state groups dotted Columbus proper.   

 The dance studio closed at 10:00 PM, and then several of us instructors haunted the nightclubs every night, where we spent the evenings hogging the dance floors. Our specialties were the Jitterbug or Swing, the Cha Cha, the Mambo, Merengue, Foxtrot, Waltz, all of the ballroom dances. It was also a time when dancing in the arms of a partner was no longer needed to join in on the fun. The floors were elbow-to-elbow with solo dancers doing the Twist, the Shimmy, the Mashed Potatoes, the Boogaloo, and the Hully Gully among others. Each night was an exhibition of dance, not only comprising us “professionals,” but the general dancing public as well. It was a time when romance sparked between men and women through their shared love of music and the act of dancing.

I read a post on Facebook recently stating that dancing can reverse the signs of aging in the brain. I wonder if I can still do the Watusi?! What role did dancing play in your younger days?






Multi-award winning author Linda Lee Greene’s books are available worldwide in soft cover and eBook formats on Amazon and other online booksellers.

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