The Coral Gables Times

Anyone Can Learn To DANCE — I Did!

BY AMY VANDERBILT The noted author and etiquette authority tells how she finally learned and adds some invaluable tips AS A CHILD I was the little, chubby girl with stringy blonde hair they put in the last row of the ballet class. The fifth position neve neant a thing to me until—I hate to say now many years later—I learned of its relation to the break in the rhumba. Not that I didn't have dancing lessons. I was literally dragged there, and then dragged around by my partners. Although I had the theory of the dance well-drummed into me throughout my pre-teens and late teens, I could just never learn to coordinate. The walt made me dizzy, the fox trot was a shar es. When Latin dancing took over, I couldn't even understand the beat. When my eldest son began to jitterbug, he tried to teach me the rudiments, and we both collapsed with laughter. I was worse than square, I was hopeless, but you should see me now. I became a good dancer when I was 45 years old. I laid the foundation, I think, for my successfu dancing when I decided to take some routine psychological tests to see if there was any ascertainable reason for my lack of coordination. The tests showed almost immediately that I was born left-handed. DURING my childhood it was fashionable to switch left-handed children to right-handedness on the ground that it is a right-handed world and that one shouldn't be too different from other people. The nice man who gave me the test asked me if I had trouble in kindergarten with pegboards, basketwork, beadwork, and so forth. I explained that this was another desperate period in my life. He laughed and said it was a wonder I got into the fifth grade because, before that time, so much depends on dexterity. I was told that I could be retrained in matters like learning to do arithmetic (I can't), learning to play the piano (the hours I spent fruitlessly at this!), and in other things, but that it was rather pointless. There were things, however, that I could learn, like dancing, through patient teaching and, in the case of dancing, by literally being dragged through the steps over and over aga until they made a pattern, I gather, on the left side of my brain, which is the side for me that acts. It was explained to me why, if the teacher said, "You put your left foot here and your right foot there," it made absolutely no sense whatsoever. I struggled along with my form of dancing for many years, but when Latin dancing actually began to take over, I just sat down. [?Then?], five years ago, I met a strong-minded man who wouldn't let me say no when the Latin music started. He was Captain Frederico Gladulich, then commanding officer of the S.S. Nassau. He and I used to dance together a lot, and like most Italians he was an excellent dancer. When I tried to sit down as the rhumba started, he held me in a firm clutch, but strong-minded as he was, he finally had to give up. "Well," he said quite flatly, "you're going to Nassau. While you are there, why don't you take Latin dancing lessons at the Emerald Beach? Who's going to know the difference? You could learn." These mildly encouraging words sped me to the private dance studio of the resident instructor at the hotel. My approach was strange. I said, "I can't do any of the Latin dances. I don't understand the beat. I am very awkward at anything like this, but if you are willing, I will try." I wish I could remember the name of that kind man. He promptly gave up trying to show me that you put this foot here and the other one there. He was tall and strong and he did drag me through the steps, over and over again. At night, when the dancing started in earnest at the hotel, he would dance dutifully with me and his other pupils. Every time I had to go on the dance floor with him I suffered more than I did in infant dancing class. I realize now how much he must have suffered, too. I was in Nassau two weeks that time, and on my return on the S.S. Nassau I was a relative surprise and delight to Captain Gladulich, and at least I understood the box step in the rhumba, although I had not at this point even heard of Cuban rhythm, an undulation difficult to describe in print but an integral part of a flashy rhumba. I can do it now. WHEN I GOT HOME, I was sufficiently encouraged to continue my dancing lessons. I knew it was useless to join a class where I would have to dance with a variety of partners, some of them probably even worse than I. Instead, I had two lessons a week at home with a cheerful young man who had graduated from being an instructor at Arthur Murray's to the job of selling advertising for our local newspaper. My lessons kept his car in gas. Slowly, under his expert administration, my ego began to bloom. I guess it is perfectly clear by now, learning to dance—really learning to dance—did all kinds of wonderful things for me. Continued on page 8 Amy Vanderbilt, after she learned to dance—seen here with her friend, Charles Columbus, host of New York's Rendez-Vous Room. Suburbia Today, September 1961 7