DANCING WITH MEMORIES

It was called Glide. A cross between talcum powder and kitchen cleanser and it was sprinkled over the floor of the local YMCA hall every Saturday night for the teenage dances. It would make your feet glide where gymnasts’ sweat had been dripping all week.

The girls would be seated on one side of the cavernous hall -- in their taffeta dresses and rope petticoats – and the boys with short, slicked down , Brylcreemed hair would sit, hormones throbbing but trying not to look too eager, on benches on the other side.

Mortifyingly, some of us were still wearing short pants. Looking back, it was a humiliating ritual for some on both sides of the hall. As each danced was announced the males crossed the DMZ – trying not to walk too fast but knowing if their dawdled they’d get an ugly one.

On the other side the wallflowers wilted.

At suppertime we got sandwiches, with edges already curling, and orange cordial. But that was sign that the best was yet to come. The Twilight Foxtrot and the Blackout Waltz. The only chance all week for an excuse to really “ press the flesh” (as LBJ would say) and maybe even get a quick clumsy “pash”.

And then it was over. The couples would separate for the last time and the boys would uncomfortably walk off the floor with one hand in a pocket. (And you would have to have been a pubescent teenaged boy back then to understand that sentence.)

Protective dads would be hovering outside to claim their precious little girls and drive them home. And it would be over for another week.

You can guess where this is leading. Dancing With The Stars. Twinkle-toed experiences over the past few weeks brought back those Glide memories from more than 45 years ago.

This week a few knock-kneed guinea pigs made our dancing debuts on the Seven Network’s new hit show. It’s a long way from the YMCA.

It has been a gruelling experience. With some interesting sidelights. It’s a mite disconcerting when you are in Coles picking out a jumbo pack of toilet paper and somebody – who has seen the promos on Seven – starts dancing in the aisle behind you.

Or a well-meaning friend says that it must be easy because obviously your professional dancing partner ( in my case Patrice Smith) does all the work. Not so. The judges – who crucified us this week – can pick a drone, a passenger, at twenty paces. They hone in on slackers like seagulls on a piece of hot fat.

Then there’s the comment, when you stagger into your local bar exhausted about nine o’clock at night after rehearsals (after a full day’s work at 3AW as well) and get the breezy comment: “How many shows have you recorded now?” Not so. They are all live to air. If you are going to make a fool of yourself on national television in front of several million people then it has to be live.

Dancing is a funny thing. In another life I was a drummer in a dance band. Derryn and his Daltones. Not to be confused with Peewee and the Delltones. At weddings and twenty-firsts and bar mitzvahs we saw proof of how many left feet most men have. Proof of the adage that “black men can’t swim and white men can’t dance.”

That’s why it was not surprising at the Space dance studio in Prahran that I met so many young couples. They weren’t there to make dancing a hobby or a career. They were there to make sure that hubby-to-be could put one foot in front of the other when bride and groom went under the spotlight for the Bridal Waltz at their wedding.

The first night of Dancing With the Stars was scary. I have been on television a thousand times. More than that. But this was different. It was an appearance under fierce and critical scrutiny in a different world. And Patrice and I were the final act. I made the predictable joke: Save the worst ‘til last.

To be honest, an hour after our appearance I couldn’t remember it. It had passed in a zombie-like dream. All I wanted to accomplish was not to make a total klutzy fool of myself. For her sake. Just complete the routine. Patrice and I had worked nights and weekends for too long to let her down.

At one stage in rehearsals she put a broom handle across my back to keep my hunched Ed Sullivan shoulders down. On another occasion she tied our arms together so that my elbow stayed up in impeccable ballroom style.

And she got used to my Lleyton Hewitt-like self-motivational chants: “C’mon Derryn, c’mon.”

At the final rehearsal in the studio, in the tails and bow tie, and with all the studio paraphernalia, I broke her two cardinal rules. She had warned me: Whatever you do, if you make a mistake don’t stop and don’t use a four-letter word on national television. In rehearsal – and lucky it was only in rehearsal – I broke both rules.

One thing I have learned from all this. I will never scoff at ballroom dancers again. They are athletes. Despite the tossed heads, the slicked down hair, the sequins and the “attitude”, these people are athletes. Honed athletes.

And I also discovered that, like many sports, dancing is as much a mental strain as a physical one. I would get home from rehearsal and find myself talking Swahili.

The legs and feet didn’t give out because I had lost weight and got fit over the past year for other reasons. But the brain went into overload. Remembering that this movement started on the second count and the next one, after a one beat pause, started on the three. Hello! How far removed from interviewing politicians is this?

And in a shameless plug: Check out my website at hinch.net. And vote early and often. My charity (which benefits from your calls) is the Cerebral Palsy Education Centre. We are building the kids a new school. And if my supposedly fancy footwork on TV can turn bucks into bricks then it has all been truly worthwhile.

February 13, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2005