Dancing was more than rock and roll

Dancing in the 50′s either at a sock hop after a football game or the Prom was more than rock and roll. We loved Elvis and Bill Haley. We loved the fast dances. We all hoped to look cool swinging our dates to the rock and roll hits but if there was anything that revved up the frustrated sexuality of 50′s teenagers, it was the slow dance. Like this one.You held your date close and touched in ways not normally approved and you did it right in front of the chaperones. Your girl had her head resting against your shoulder, her breasts pressing up against your chest, one arm around her waist while you held her hand with the other. There weren’t really any steps to the slow dance. You just shuffled around the floor. It was hard to keep your mind on your feet with the hormones raging. Holding your girl tight was so close to the fantasies that you were supposed to keep out of your thoughts, it was a wonder that you could move your feet at all.

We weren’t boomers!

Teenagers in the 50′s were not baby boomers. We were war babies, conceived on leave or by dad’s who were not in the military. Then we started school in the midst of the economic and social vitality following the war. We hadn’t been indulged in our early years like our younger siblings but we hadn’t been beat down by the depression either. We were optimistic. We were tough and independent. We didn’t expect the world to shower us with our every need but we were happy when it did.

War babies own slow dancing

I think that the slow dance belongs to us war babies. We liked the fast dances. Rock and roll was our inspiration. But we knew what was important. We never forgot that nothing was better than holding your girl tight and moving with the rhythms of a romantic beat. When the boomers took over high school and college, their narcissism brought us new dances where you never touched your partner or even seemed to need them like the twist and it’s myriad mutations.   Slow dancing lasted in to the 60′s.The last great slow dance was Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers. It captured all the frustrated sexuality and longing we war babies remember. Dancing has never been the same. Try to get that Loving Feeling  with Norwegian Wood

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