“Dance first. Then think. It’s the natural order.” – Samuel Beckett

“Do you wanna dance and hold my hand. Do ya do ya wanna dance?” – The Beach Boys

Over the decades, a cultural institution in America has quietly faded away into nothingness. Once a staple of adolescence, allowing teenagers their first opportunity to dip their toes into the mating pool, the school dance has gone the way of the dinosaur and the clutch pedal.

The dance was a place where a boy could gather all night with all his friends, learn that beer (inside someone’s car trunk in the parking lot) tasted pretty good once you were past the first one, and could approach females with sketchy lines without being arrested. Usually.

For the girls, it was a venue to market their… uh… attributes, wear their best clothes and write the script for the drama of the night. It’s where they did the matchups, breakups and every emotional part of the play, especially if their boyfriend (or potential boyfriend) had access to the beer supply.

Despite its name, actually dancing was a small part of the action. Unlike the get-togethers of the last several centuries, no one expected you to spend hours and hours learning the intricate movements of the waltz or foxtrot.

We mainly just flailed our arms and legs around to a 4/4 beat, looking like a crowd of asylum inmates having an epileptic fit. To really loud music.

All over Columbus and many other Mississippi towns and cities, dances were held in school gyms, auditoriums and rental buildings like the American Legion Hut in Propst Park. They were nominally sponsored and run by adults who had no idea what was actually going on inside or out.

Dances were the stock and trade of my band, the Rogues, the Blades of Grass and the Castaways. In the loose atmosphere of 1960’s bars, we were able to get gigs despite our young ages, but the problem is that our audience usually couldn’t get in to see us. So dances were our best option.

All of us traveled on weekends to many North Mississippi towns in our radius to deliver rock and roll to the masses.

Teenagers and young adults today have nothing like it. They’re sad little iPhone drones, pecking away their lives in a plastic universe.

If you’ve ever been to a wedding or event where they might congregate, you’ll find the “boys” (some as old as 30) standing alone on one side, phone in hand, the “girls” (ditto on age) standing on the other side.

If they choose to make contact at all, they’ll be texting a girl they already know (they have the phone number). More likely they are on Instagram or taking a picture of themselves to post. With filters.

We had to walk up to a strange girl and say something stupid, but believe it or not it occasionally bore fruit. There is no gain without risk.

Things of course did not always go smoothly.

During one dance, Stevie O’Callaghan had spent too much time in the parking lot and was too many beers over the sane limit. Somehow, he decided that mating was not the main mission that night.

He picked out a girl who was admittedly not exactly prom queen material and was known for her nasty disposition. Stevie drunkenly approached her.

“Hey, what you doin’ tomorrow night?”

Beaming like she had just won the Miss Mississippi contest, “Why, nothing!”

“How ‘bout taking a bath…”

It took about a week for the black eye to heal up.

Thom Caraccio ([email protected]) is a retired musician and retired motion picture scenic artist living in West Palm Beach, Florida who hails from Columbus. He graduated from S.D. Lee High in 1968 and still considers Columbus his real hometown.

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