July 15: Dancing

There used to be a pennant in my bedroom that showed Snoopy and Woodstock dancing. The accompanying slogan said: "To dance is to live; to live is to dance." The pennant was a forest green and was my first introduction to semi-colons. I don't know where I got it but it found a home on my bedroom wall. I wasn't into dancing - I was still young and insecure enough to dismiss dancing as a "girls' activity" - but that pennant just seemed so at home in my bedroom. I looked at it constantly and the slogan seemed apropos.

Because, of course, the pennant didn't preach dancing as a prerequisite for happiness. What it did preach was that frivolity is important. Hard work is more important, of course, but sometimes, as Kenny Loggins says, you've got to kick off the Sunday shoes.

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I sure do miss Rae MacCulloch, who was my favourite Glengarrian.* Here was a woman who dedicated her life to teaching Highland dancing out of her home in South Glengarry. Her dancers were a mainstay at the Glengarry Highland Games. Some of them toured the world and a few of them danced for the Queen.

But Rae's school was not a competitive one. You wouldn't see a Rae MacCulloch dancer vying for a gold medal in the hot and sweat-filled tents of the Glengarry Highland games. She taught her students to dance simply for the love of dancing. For her, dancing was the means and the end. There was no need to compete because she didn't equate trophies with happiness, she equated happiness with dancing.

Back in 2004, I got to watch Rae MacCulloch and hundreds of her dancers, both past and present, break a world record for the most Highland dancers dancing at once. This took place at that year's edition of the Glengarry Highland games and, once it was over, Rae MacCulloch looked happier than I have ever seen anyone look in my life. I wanted to run right over to her and hug her, but I didn't. I was just the newspaper photographer. I knew that the first person to embrace her and to congratulate her should be someone in her family.

Her legacy lives on at these Highland games, unfortunately cancelled for a second year in a row thanks to buggabugga.

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I know very little of Highland dancing and I couldn't tell you the difference between a Sword dance and a Highland Fling. It all looks the same to me but there is still an undeniable elegance to it. Highland dancers are all pretty. This is because Highland dancing makes you beautiful.

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My niece and nephews dance, though I think it's fallen by the wayside a bit since buggabugga came along. There is a dance studio in my town, right across the street from where I live, in fact, that has remained closed because of buggabugga. I have just left a message with them, asking for a phone call so I can write a news story about the studio's post-COVID future.

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I am embarrassed to say that I resented learning dances in various elementary school and junior high physical education classes. Even the Teton Mountain Stomp was too "girly" for me. I remember in Grade 6, our school decided to do a "dances of the world" event and our class was awarded Scotland. To my memory, the dance involved us walking in a circle, arms linked with a classmate of the opposite gender, and "skipping" on every third beat.

And this brings to memory the sad story of Sherman Jones** who was in Grade 12 when I was in Grade 10. I am sad to report that Sherman was never going to make the cover of GQ. He was only four feet and ten inches tall, would have been nearly blind if it wasn't for the purple-tinted Coke bottle glasses he wore, had rust coloured hair that the was the texture of a Brillo pad and his glandular system had gone totally bonkers, turning his face into a galaxy of pimples and pus. I doubt he even weighed 100 pounds.

He worked the backstage crew on the school's play that year, where I had the lead role. We became chummy, not best friends but enough to say hi to each other in the halls. One day, I was walking by the gym and I saw floor hockey game going on. I looked inside and I saw Sherman Jones there. He had a stick in his hand and had captured the ball before a bigger player unceremoniously stole it form him.

I thought this was odd. That was a Grade 12 gym class and in my school, gym was purely optional after your freshman year. So, during a break in the play rehearsal, I asked Sherman why he was in that class. He was quiet for a second and then he said that if he told me the reason, he wanted me to promise that I wouldn't laugh.

"I promise," I said.

Sherman told me that he had slogged his way through gym classes in Grades 10 and 11 and most of 12 because at the end of the class, there was a unit on ballroom dancing.

"I didn't know you did ballroom dancing," I said.

"I don't," he said. "But I figure this will be the only time in my life when I'll get to hold a woman."

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* I'm not a butthead for saying that.

** Not his real name.