Save the Last Dance for Me

I blame Chubby Checker for how distant we’ve become. Parents in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s would have blamed Elvis and Buddy Holly and James Brown for ruining dancing. For the generations before us, dancing was the only way couples could snuggle up close for a little while in public. Not so with Boomers. We had the car and the drive-in movie and several out of the way secret parking areas. Around here, Nims Lake was a favorite…shhh, don’t tell anybody.

We still loved to dance, or some of us did. Dancing seemed to come naturally to girls. Maybe they learned in studios like Miss Susan’s on Confederate Street or it could be that the image of practicing with a tie and a doorknob was a reality. Anyway, they were years ahead of boys in bipedal dexterity. Even guys who could weave through a field of tacklers or dribble adroitly down the basketball court would seem to have their shoes on the wrong feet when facing that special girl on the dance floor.

It was the time of the dance. For my place and time, it was the shag, or the “Beach Shag.” Popular legend places the Shag’s origin somewhere between Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Carolina Beach, North Carolina but it owes its origins to the jitterbug, a fast, frenetic couples dance popular in Harlem nightclubs as early as the 1930’s. Couples danced apart usually joined by one hand and incorporated twirls, turns, jumps and even flips to music created by swing bands led by the music of Cab Calloway and Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive, and Wail!”

Along the coast of the Carolinas, let’s drop a pin on Ocean Drive in 1957. Despite segregationist policies still clinging to a shameful past, the music of black artists found its way onto juke boxes and into record stores at the speed of 45 revolutions per minute. We called it “Soul” but it was more correctly named “Rhythm and Blues” or “R&B.” Fueled at first by the driving sounds of Little Richard and the powerhouse energy of Chuck Berry, the “Jitterbug” took its place on the dance floor wrapped in cigarette smoke and smelling of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I once watched my Uncle Elwin and Aunt Annie jitterbug at a wedding. Their time was the early nineteen-fifties but in the early nineteen-eighties, they still had it.

We all know one fact about the beaches of the Carolinas…the summers swelter. Early dance clubs at Ocean Drive, popularly called O.D., were open to catch the steamy sea breezes brought on after sunset. It is the nature of folks in these sweltering climes to loosen shirt collars and put on shorts and to slow things down. Songs by the Drifters, Jerry Butler and the Carolina’s own Maurice Williams ushered in my age group. While at the beach, the shag was becoming as much a spectator driven ritual as a dance, we folks in the upper part of the state tended toward free-form. There was less showcase movement and a more relaxed set of rules.

My generation was still tied to an unwritten dress code. Even at weekend dances at the Springs Clubhouse or the American Legion, the “cool”girls would wear their seersucker Villager dresses with the “little round collars”. Clothing for boys was just as regulated with khaki pants and button-down collar solid-color Oxford or Madras shirts with loafers. Even at the beach, the only changes were to Bermuda shorts for both genders.

For most of my generation, between ages 14 and 17, the real clubs were off limits. For us, there was the Myrtle Beach Pavilion where dozens of us, boys and girls alike, scuffed our oxblood Weejun loafers on the concrete floor to the latest sounds on the jukebox. I loved the slow shag numbers, “Smokey Places” or “Save the last dance for Me.” They allowed for more creativity with slower turns and spins. I have always been a fan of creativity, a trait not always appreciated by my dancing partner. It was not unusual for me to hear, “Where did that move come from?” sometimes followed by, “Don’t do that again.” I admit to being charged with dancing left-footed. 

When we hit the magic eighteen, the age for legal beer consumption at the time, we could inhabit the more grown-up venues. At the Beach Club, down a driveway from Highway 17, I saw Martha and the Vandellas and Jerry Butler. During my late teens, the Beach Club was about the only club featuring live bands. The Pad, located on the second row in Ocean Drive, had a loaded jukebox and everybody’s name written on the walls. It was dark and tinged with unspoken sexual energy. There were dedicated couples, of course, but the club was the haunt of 18 to 21-year-old singles. With a cold beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, boys and girls scanned the club for a potential summer romance. It was a great time to be young and alive.

When Chubby Checker caught the world on fire with “The Twist” in the early 60’s, we were good with it. The twist was a great way to shake out some energy between shag records. While the western world worried about creeping communism, we must have been looking the other way and as a result, holding hands on the dance floor became passe.

Those of us raised on cornbread and barbecue, and sausage gravy and real tomatoes are slow to change our ways. Often that is not a good thing but to our credit, we never gave up on the shag and we still feel a nostalgic rush when we hear “Under the Boardwalk” or “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” on the oldies station.

Music got faster, hair got longer, and skirts got shorter. Flannel and denim became the uniform of individuality and the smell of beer was sometimes lost to the smell of burning leaves. (For those who don’t get the “burning leaves” reference, Bless you and don’t ask.) Suddenly our partner was three feet away and mashing potatoes or swimming or prancing like a pony. Sometimes, it was hard to tell who was gyrating with whom.

I have lived through folks whose thrill was line dancing to “Boot Scoot Boogie” or Zombie dancing to “Thriller.”  I’ve never crowd surfed, or slam danced but if that is your thing, enjoy. I am too far into fogey fever to change much now and as the great Jimmy Buffet said, “These brittle bones don’t bend.” While I wouldn’t turn down a slow dance to “When a Man Loves a Woman” and I believe I could shag all the way through “Thank You, John” without sitting down to rest, my club days have passed.

So, here’s my suggestion. Time travel for just a few minutes. Find an Oldies channel on Pandora or Sirius XM, kick off your shoes and pretend there’s sand between your toes. Now close your eyes and drift…conjure up those clueless days of laughter and young love and irresponsibility. Remember the time we thought we would never grow old and the friends who would be forever with us. I’ll meet you there for one last dance.