Looking for Some Hot Stuff
Danny Gallagher
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Mama caught my sister and me dancing one Sunday afternoon in the carport and rushed over spewing Bible verses about the sins of our ways.

“This will lead to nothing but a bad reputation,” she said, cutting off the stereo and Partridge Family album, David Cassidy’s voice extinguished and replaced with an echo of silent scorn. “First, Sabbath dancing. Then blue eye shadow. Next comes French kissing and ear blowing.”

Sometimes children have to break in their mothers like saddles. After a couple of years of junior high and the screeching emotions of our puberty, my own Southern Baptist mama had whipped a 180 and was wearing half-tops, hitting the Moose Lodge and Country Club and dancing with my daddy after imbibing a couple of bourbon and waters.

“It’s OK as long as you don’t slow dance,” she said, amending the rules of How Not to Sully Your Good Name and Ruin Chances for a Rich Husband. “But if you do slow dance, make sure the boy does more than stand there and press into you. Make sure his feet are moving and his hands aren’t sliding to your fanny. That looks vulgar. Remember, slow dancing leads to other things.”

Yes, Lord, it does. And I’m here to tell you about them.

In fact, the dance floor has led to the downfall of many a woman -- and a man or two along the way.

Back when I was a bit of a boozer and young enough to have Farrah Fawcett hair and Heather Locklear thighs, the dance floor was where love sparked, lust ignited, and the hearts of many a young man or woman fell to the wood floors and burned to death under a disco ball.

Mama told us to always say ‘yes’ if a boy asked us to dance. “It takes a lot for them to get up their courage and it’s rude to say ‘no.’” My sister and I knew the pain of being uglyish in junior high and standing in a clump of girls, watching the pretty, popular sultresses being asked to dance as we leaned against walls and pretended not to care. But Mama had no idea of the weirdo magnets implanted in our bodies, microchips that drew hordes of duds, creeps, latent pedophiles, personality-maimed fellows and future serial killers toward us -- guys who would spot our Farrah hair from across the pulsating room and slide over to our table.

“Wanna dance?” a Yuckster would ask, and a picture of my mother shaking her finger in warning would flash: “Better dance with him. If you don’t it will come back and haunt you. Remember, they’re humans with hearts, too. Just God’s Unclaimed Blessings.”

So my sister and I danced with the eyesores of the world, the prisoners on work release and weekend furloughs and the deranged or homeless who’d collected enough in their cups to boogie in a bar and have a draft or two. Most of them were nice enough to share a single dance with. No harm done. But if one of them kept asking us over and over to repeat the mercy dance, we would take care of matters best we knew how.

And that is where the Howdy Doody dance came into the picture.

“Watch this,” I said to Sandy as I rose from my chair to cut the rug and pull the Howdy Doody on a guy who’d tucked his plaid button-down shirt into pants yanked up to his sternum, the crotch of which split his scrotum into something resembling pig’s hooves. I tried not to look at his cloven crotch because that would give a guy the wrong idea and notions of future fornications.

As a naughty 22-year-old with skinny upper arms and no stomach goiter -- a woman without the foresight to see that one day she would be 42 and out of options and her skin would hang from the bone like overcooked meat -- I thought I was hot stuff. On the dance floor, I stuck out my teeth and all but brayed, extending one hand in a “Howdy” move, while doing a bit of the “Hokey-Pokey” combined with a John Travolta Saturday Night Fever pose thrown in here and there -- that Statue of Liberty thing he does. I combined it all with a shock-eyed, crazed woman toothy grin and, if I felt limber or tipsy enough, I’d arch and do a backbend and crab walk.

At this point, the men, even those with pig-foot crotches and plenty of larceny convictions, would barely make it to the song’s end before hightailing it back to Penitentiary Land. Sandy and I invariably employed the “Howdy Doody” dance on many occasions when plagued by the outcasts of the dance club who weren’t satisfied with one mercy dance.

The only bad part of that routine was that no cute men would ever ask us to dance once we’d pulled one of our best One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest performances. That was not nice, what we did, and I knew one day I would be paid back for all this naughtiness. Mama told us countless times growing up we would reap what we’d sewn; what comes around goes around; make fun of someone and whatever they have, you’ll get it… Call the lady with the huge fanny a “fat butt” and you’d wake up one day with an ass that could cart bags of charcoal.

But I wasn’t quite ready for the punitive end to this fun just yet. I had another round coming before I was willing to pay the price for my evil dance-floor ways.

That time dawned when my dear friend Leslie was getting married and Kathy, Lisa, Diane, Terri, and the gang threw her a bachelorette party, complete with a limo and stripper. Only she didn’t know about the stripper. We’d booked him through Fantasies Alive and were told he had “the complete package.”

“He’ll do three or four dances and take off everything but his g-string,” the woman on the phone told Lisa who was in charge of arrangements. “He could be a Chippendale if he wanted,” the woman bragged. “You oughta see his g-string. It’s black with a red devil head rising out of his groin. And let me tell you, he’s loaded. He fills out both the horns, if you know where I’m coming from.”

Oh, how utterly lovely, I thought.