Dancing up a storm

I was watching a History Channel show tonight about the decade of the 70s, and it reminded me what a truly horrible time that was in many respects.

I was a child when the decade started and a teenager when it ended, so some of my memories are a little bit hazy. I thought Watergate was a big dam somewhere. I would stay up late during the summer and watch Johnny Carson and I’d laugh at the Richard Nixon jokes, even though I didn’t get them.

Rich Little appeared on TV shows all the time and did a bad Richard Nixon impression. I thought he was the worst impressionist ever, until Dana Carvey came along.

I recall a few landmark moments in the 70s. I remember Elvis dying, and the Jonestown massacre, and President Ford being shot at twice, and the big Bicentennial celebration, and the biggest disappointment of my entire childhood, Evel Knievel’s aborted attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon on a souped-up rocket motorcycle. My friends and I talked about nothing else for 6 months, and then the event itself was a monumental letdown.

Anita Bryant was a big deal in the ’70s. You remember her – she was a runner-up in the 1959 Miss America pageant, then was an orange juice spokeswoman, but mostly became known because she didn’t care much for your homosexuals, and she made a big deal about it.

I had a brush with fame, sort of, when I danced with her daughter at a party. Apparently her family was friends with the family of a girl I was after in high school, named Nydia. I went to a party at Nyrdia’s house, and she didn’t want anything to do with me, but I wound up chatting with Anita Bryant’s daughter for a while, and we even danced together a few times. I never actually caught her name.

After that party, I never saw her again. It’s just as well. Things would have never worked out between me and her, because I doubt her mother would have approved of me. While I had a fondness for Miss America runners-up, I didn’t particularly have anything against your homosexuals, and I didn’t care for orange juice.

Things didn’t work out with Nydia, either, perhaps because I realized she wasn’t very pretty. Of course, I didn’t realize that until she turned me down for a date, but I look back at it now, and I’m like, Whew! Dodged a bullet there!

My voice cracked a lot in the late 70s, and I was introduced to acne, but by far the worst thing to happen the entire decade was disco music. Here’s the deal with disco music – it all sucks. Every single song. It all sucked then, and it all sucks now.

I was dragged to an actual disco one time. It was around 1984, well after the disco era supposedly ended, but it lived on in a few clubs around the country. One of those was a place called The Limelight in Atlanta, and I was convinced to go there by, of course, some girls. It is amazing what a hormone-crazed young man can be convinced to do by pretty girls.

I walked in the place, and I realized that I had died, and I was now in hell. The music was loud and horrific, the people all dressed funny, and I suspected that I was part of the 1 percent of the crowd not under the influence of cocaine. I wanted to leave so bad I felt like crying.

There was a big dance floor, and around it were there huge speakers, and some of the more exuberant dancers got on top of the speakers and shook-shook-shook their booties. I looked up and there was a guy I knew from high school, in tight pants, his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, doing all the John Travolta moves and having the time of his life. Anita Bryant would not have been pleased.

Discos, I hope are dead now. So is Nixon, and Ford and Evel Knievel. I don’t know where Anita’s daughter is now, but I hope she’s still dancing. But not on top of the speakers.