Senior Caveats

Paul, here: proudly, gratefully designated The Dancer by the HSC Board of Directors. I have a few comments about seniors dancing: testimonies for, and a caveat or two of warning. First, the good side: Last autumn I was invited to the Lake Placid American Legion by a table full of widows, all seniors. Three of them had recently had heart problems: strokes, heart attacks. Everyone at the table loved to dance; but those three needed help just standing up let alone dancing. Stand they did, and dance they did: and here's the point: by spring time all three were standing and dancing without support!!! Jerry, in her upper eighties, still had a bit of a body tremble, but much less so. Ann, who'd hang on for dear life in October, was independently jitterbugging, twisting, doing the Charleston, by March! And Maxine got trimmer, stronger, younger looking!

A couple of months ago I gave some dance lessons to Hildy and Larry. The HSC remembers Larry falling over a chair last January and breaking his hip: here he was in early summer, his 90^th birthday coming up, taking dancing lessons, planning to take a paddle boat excursion with his new girl friend Hildy, and making real progress: with the foxtrot, the waltz, the rumba ... Look at him now; you'd never believe he'd broken his hip (let alone been a bachelor!)

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Caveats

OK: there's no limit to what endorsements for dancing I or others could gather here; but there are also warnings appropriate, especially for the elderly: especially where the man has not danced much before, or the widow hasn't danced in the decades of her late husband's illness ... I'll leave such as obvious though for the moment: to get to a warning about line-dancing that may not be obvious:

I hear that there's a high incidence of injury among line dancers. We can imagine some of the possible reasons: one line-dances typically in a group, and group mentality can keep one going on where caution might have occurred to an individual not swept up by the group ... True enough, and we can imagine others. But I jump straight to a reason I wound't have suspect before I began line-dancing myself: last autumn, right here at the HSC: Jean our teacher for the Electric Slide:Line-dances, nearly all of them, make sudden turns toward a new wall. Many of the turns are ninety degrees, but some are 180 degrees, and some are 270!

Be careful. Don't blow your knee trying to keep up when you haven't yet had time to drill your body in unweighting at exactly the right time, swiveling at exactly the right time ...Meantime, at HSC, I, Paul, try to avoid dances with some of the more violent turns. We're seniors after all.

The Boot Scootin' Boogie has a 180 degree turn on the 20^th count — but lots of us are already rehearsed in that one. If you're not in practice, if you don't have the timing coordinated just so, your weight transfers graceful, take it easy, slow it down, dance to the side where you won't get run over by the stampede of your fellow dancers.

And there's another recommendation, a positive: coordinating as a group is a pleasure in itself. Ballroom dancing mixes independent couples; line-dancing is group-coordinated: like Rockettes.