After all these years when I boasted about teaching dance, doing dance routines, etc., even though I never claimed to be really good, just competent – in those years that have slipped– and slipped so thoroughly behind me that I might as well be relating stories about Mary Queen of Scots or Elizabeth Barrett Browning: would you believe that I believed, somehow that I could still dance if I had the chance? Yes, I still believed that.
I’ve been recently accompanying my sister –three years younger, although at this point that difference doesn’t matter much—to Zumba classes. Zumba! I would have regarded such an activity an affront to the concept of “dance,” if I’d even heard of such a thing back then.
So, I have “danced” with my sister once again. Once again? Wait until you hear this.
We danced together long ago, as we recently related to friends of mine who were uproarious in their incredulity. We danced at first in boxes. “We did,” Jean insisted. “We were the dancing cigarette pack and match box years ago.”
“No!’
“Yes. Remember them, from TV? Old Gold I think the ad was. Black and white TV. The majorette boots, legs and boxes? Well, for the recital Jackie was the cigarette box.”
“At twelve I was twice as tall as her nine -year-old self,” I explained. “I had the bigger box. ‘Lucky’ Cigarettes the round emblem said. Of course it looked like the Lucky Strike emblem. There were handles inside the box.”
Jean admits. “I was really short, small for nine. I was the match box. Yes, we had handles inside.”
“And screens for viewing. The first part of that dance was to ‘Smoke Gets in your eyes,’ I reminisced.
She concurred. “Then the boxes were removed—and we were wearing those leotards.”
Here we burst into peals of laughter. We added, almost simultaneously, “White satin leotards with a sequin Lucky Stripe emblem, the white leotard trimmed in brown nylon ruffles, around the neck and arms and legs–”
“—to represent tobacco!”
“No–o-o-o!” Our audience.
Yes. After all these years such “acts” are hard to explain. But we did one. We tap danced in majorette boots as satin cigarettes.
Now, seventy years later, we’re dancing together again. Of course there are other women, all facing a mirror, the Zumba session at her local “Y.” Now she takes the lead; now she knows what she’s doing, and I, the superior cigarette box, have to follow the matches, so to speak. What I had held in contempt (“Zumba is not dance!) is difficult, it turns out. I lose my balance, it turns out. After all these years.