the Hokey Pokey

     When we were talking about jitterbugging one time, I asked David, "Were you a dancing fool?"
"No," he said, "The fools were those girls who let me roll them across my back!"

     Recently he asked, "Did you do the hokey pokey?"

     My class didn't. We started out in about the fourth or fifth grade learning to bop. We watched Dick Clark's American Bandstand and did what those teens on TV did  (at least the kids who had TV did, and they taught it to the rest of us.) Mostly, dancing was just free-form (but not dirty dancing). We escaped most fads like "the Watusi" and "the Chicken," and "the Bump" was 'way after our high-school time.

      An exception was "The Twist." That was popular when Dean was an undergraduate, and at one Christmas eve celebration at Johnnie's house, he taught Milly to twist.  She threw her back out and had to have diathermy treatments for weeks.

Dave adds:In 1962-3, I was doing the twist to the “Let’s Twist Again” version as a dancing bartender behind the bar at the Pierce Street Annex in San Francisco!  Oh, my, those were the days, my friend, I thought they’d never end, we’d sing and dance forever and a day ...


     As for the hokey pokey, we did learn to sing it at Girl Scout camp, and woodenly we'd  "put your left foot in, put your left foot out, you put your left foot in and you shake it all about, you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around, that's what it's all about!" It took Aunt Evelyn to show us how it was supposed to be danced. (She could do the Charleston, too.)

     David says, "We danced to it throughout high school.  I hated it.  I hated it even more when the girls started dancing to it at our 25+ reunions.