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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