The Funnies: New Dance Steps (1914)

"Yes, I find there's nothing like a motor for giving me ideas for new dance steps."

Life Magazine, December 31, 1914

The Funnies - Dance Practice (1914)

Dauber, who is a little out of practice, receives an invitation to dance/

Life Magazine, March 1914

The Funnies - A Distinction (1920)

A Distinction

"Do you dance - or jazz."

Pan, July 1920

Welcome to Scott Joplin's Missouri

Today I’m writing from Hotel Bothwell in Sedalia, MO – Queen of the Prairie and one-time home of ragtime genius Scott Joplin. For my dear Kelly, this is a trip down memory lane. Her parents have been ragtime enthusiasts for decades and they brought her to Sedalia as a child to attend the annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival. For me, on the other hand, it’s another first and further proof that the proverbial old dog can, in fact, learn a trick or two, new or otherwise. I knew I liked Joplin the first time I saw The Sting and heard Easy Winners, Solace, and The Entertainer. Thirty-some years have passed and I’m still discovering things I love about the culture, music, and fashion of the ragtime era. So, when Kelly suggested we travel to Sedalia for what might be one last Joplin Festival with her parents, there was no way I could say “no”.

We set off from Indy this morning at an hour that really doesn’t qualify as early, rolling out of town around seven o’clock and clearing the city before rush hour was over in the company of rain. The trip west, at least across the planes of Illinois was uneventful in spite of Google Maps best efforts to convince us Sedalia, MO is located in Tennessee. We eventually sorted out our route and arrived at Hotel Bothwell by four o’clock, only shortly before the streets were taken in for the evening.

The Bothwell opened in 1927, a classy seven story hotel in a small town with all the modern conveniences and, supposedly, it’s haunted…so we may be sharing our room. That remains to be seen. What I can say is staying in a room from the 20’s puts you in touch with just how overboard our expectations and addiction to gadgetry has gotten in our modern age. It’s a room that a queen-sized bed makes feel crowded. Back when the hotel opened the average traveler would have one, maybe two bags relying on the in-house laundry service to keep him in clothes, they would have slept on a twin bed, and had no computer or cell phone to plug in to the wall…in fact, phones were in the lobby or in wall sconces in the hallways.

I killed a little time walking around the town square, taking in the sights around the courthouse and trying to imagine what the town must have looked like in Joplin’s day. He’d played the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, but by 1894 he was living in a tiny Midwestern town that couldn’t offer him the professional opportunities he would have in the big city. Now the courtyard has a memorial to the soldiers who took part in World Ward I, a statue of a dough boy with bayonet and grenade, a war that didn't end until after Joplin's death. Now there's a Howitzer from World War II and boots and a M16 from Vietnam. All around the courthouse were the relics of war, yet nothing of the man who helped create a style of music that's influenced everything from bluegrass and country to rock and rap.

Afternoon turned to evening and we rested from the long drive for a while and then walked a block to the Liberty Theater for the night’s concert and heard some of the best ragtime pianists around; listened to tunes like Easy Winners, Black Lightning Cakewalk, and American Beauty; and generally had a great time. Tomorrow, dancing and ragtime dance lessons, more music, and more pictures.

The Foxtrot Strikes Back

Oh Mr. Sinatra how I hate you. I hate the lazy way you linger behind the beat and the casual aggressiveness with which then run it over. Most of all I hate how I feel when my feet won't obey the urge to dance to one of your standards.

January's dance update included a healthy reminder that I may never get the Jazz-age foxtrot. There's some part of my soul that doesn't want to accept the slow-slow-quick-quick-slow pattern. It hangs onto that second slow too long and then stumbles headlong into the first quick and my partner. Neither are amused by this miscue. They tend to find my two left feet a bit heavy on their toes and are in dismay at the scuffing of their good dance shoes. None the less I keep trying.

A good part of this month's vintage dance lesson focused on the diagonal sidestep, a handy tool in all the ballrooms I frequent. Traffic on the dance floor is a little like traffic at the Indy 500, it's supposed to be a constant, counter-clockwise motion, but all too often you'll find some contestant heading in a direction that's contrary to everyone's best interest. In situations like this a good driver makes use of two things: the brakes and the steering wheel. The dancer, on the other hand, uses delays and turns. If some clod decides to stop and debate politics in the middle of Mean to Me, you're abridged to veer left or right passing the offender with enough velocity to uncurl his hair or gracefully buy time until you're free to proceed, all while maintaining that fixed ballroom smile. If you're me, you turn hard, spin out, and clear pit row leaving a trail that a tornado would find impressive in your wake.

Sunday night we tried the foxtrot out at the Indiana Roof. The Director's Dance Orchestra had the stage, a mean bunch of musicians who, judging by the speed at which they played all their selections, are paid a flat rate. They stormed through every waltz as if it'd been written by Strauss and treated everything else like a lindy hop. Still, with Kelly's encouragement (and before the crowds arrived), I tentatively agreed to give the basic foxtrot a try. And this is where my hatred of Sinatra comes in.

You see, it's one thing to struggle through the beginning stages of learning a dance. In the beginning every dance is embarrassingly hard. You will trod upon your partner's feet, so it's best to begin each tune with a heartfelt and sincere, "I apologize for what I'm about to do to you." It's learning. You didn't come out of the womb knowing how to walk or talk and not one of us went from slobbering toddler to eloquent fellow about town without falling right on our keisters a million and a half times in the process. It's natural.

Imagine, if you would, attempting to learn to walk with some joker moving the floor on you at random intervals and occasionally opening a trap door or two. This, my friends, is learning the foxtrot to the music of Frank Sinatra. The man is a genius, a talent, and albeit an ass as a human being, a treasure as a musician. He performs verbal cosmetic surgery on a tune, nipping here, tucking there, and blowing up other bits with silicon. In the end the sum of his work isn't natural...but it sure makes you stare. This, is what I got into when I walked onto the floor at the Indiana Roof...Witchcraft, in more ways than one.

We didn't make it a quarter of the way around the floor. My left foot became well acquainted with my right foot, since they were occupying the same space most of the time, and soon I was considering hiring a private detective to find the "one". At the earliest possible moment I bailed for the seats and we sat out the remainder of the evening's foxtrots with me swearing under my breath and doubting whether I'd ever really get this dance. Later, when calmer heads prevailed, I realized it was just a bad turn, but at the time I felt pretty damned defeated.

Now, over 24 hours later, I realize it's not all disaster and failure. I look at the weekend's lessons and dancing and I know we're making good progress. The cross-step waltz is coming along and we added a grand total of three new moves to our repertoire (the "he-goes-she-goes", the promenade and spin, and the swing-out) and though we didn't add anything our tango passed muster...it's just a shame we didn't dance any of those.

The Scandalous Tango

I don't write about my passion for dancing often enough. I convinced my wife, Kelly, to take up tripping the light fantastic almost ten years ago after a weekend's old movie binge. After seeing a few dozen smoky supper clubs with smartly dressed folks dining and dancing to the swing of Benny Goodman or Cab Calloway, I'd pretty much punched my own dance ticket and we started taking lessons that same year. Later I'd find out Kelly had thought (and maybe hoped) this would be a passing fad and that I'd kick the jitterbug after I found out how much work it was to learn dance. Coming up on an decade later and we've only expanded the sorts of venues and music we call our own.

For those in the know, we started pretty much in the same way as everyone else who goes to one of the big, industrial dance complexes for their instruction. We got a good teacher who we really loved and we started out with American Ballroom's version of East Coast Swing, Rumba, Waltz, and Foxtrot.  It took us a year to get pretty good - good enough that we started asking a simple question, what did we really want to get from dance anyway? The answer is, like most things in life, complicated. We wanted fun, we didn't want to compete or medal or fulfill anyone else's definition of "good dancing", but we wanted to keep learning and growing. So, at the three year mark we made the controversial decision to drop the Ballroom Waltz and Foxtrot neither of which felt right to us. We justified this, thinking we just were "swing dancers" and should focus on that dance alone.

Now, ten years into dancing, we understand that it wasn't that we didn't like the Waltz and Foxtrot, we simply didn't like the Ballroom Waltz and Foxtrot. You see, as a culture we've become so disconnected with dance that we assume there's really only one Waltz, one Foxtrot, and one of every sort of dance and furthermore that the one right way to do any of these dances is the way you'll see on some schmaltzy, staged, reality show like Dancing with the Stars or Strictly Ballroom. Don't get me wrong, Ballroom dance is legit and if you're happy with it, more power to you, but it's important to realize that not only isn't Ballroom the only way to dance, it's not even the original.

Before Irene and Vernon Castle began the quest to "civilize" dance in the early 1900's, every region had its own collection of dances, many having evolved from similar dances in nearby regions. Fads rolled across the country, like the "animal dances" of the ragtime era, and you were likely to have learned to dance in elementary school and polished your style by picking up moves from relatives and friends. The resulting dance world was a wild, mish-mash of styles and steps that often left societies mavens aghast and offended with they perceived as the bawdiness and downright immorality of youth culture.

A quote from the preface of the 1917 book Dance Mad or The Dances of the Day captures the general attitude of those who would dare be creative on the dance floor, "Some rising young dancer stumbles on to a new step, while practicing; he teaches it to some innocent girl; of course she asks, What is it? Then the villain thinks quickly of a name; his mind instantly recalls some slang phrase he has heard while making the rounds, with no sense of shame he calls it by the new (?) name, regardless of how degrading or ridiculous." The turn of the 20th century was the era of ragtime and the scandal of "animal dances."

As far as the scions of good taste were concerned, the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, and the Bunny Hug were a bona fied sign of the impending collapse of American society and the Apocalypse couldn't be far behind. Suddenly young people were...touching...even embracing in public! The dances were banned in cities across the country and there is some evidence that fears of the Turkey Trot might have led Woodrow Wilson to cancel his inaugural ball in 1913. In jurisdictions across the land, from rural Kansas to New York City, you could land in jail for any of a number of "lewd and suggestive" dances. Heck, in Cincinnati, Catholic bishops told their flocks that they would not be forgiven for the sin of dancing the Turkey Trot. Enter Vernon and Lillian Castle.

The Castles chief contribution to dancing was to popularize a formalized style of dance roughly equivalent to what we'd call Ballroom dancing today. Gone were the hugs, silliness, and creative interpretation, and in was a system that endorsed one "right" way to do a few dances that were acceptable for social and public dancing.  Take a quick look at the difference. First you've got an example of the dance too risqué for President Wilson, the Turkey Trot, followed by Lillian and Vernon Castle performing their own Castle Walk.

Does one of these look more fun than the other? Well, though having too much fun in public was one reason the uptight wanted to ban many dances, there was a far more sinister reason and it mainly had to do with race and class.

America, the great mixing pot of the world, has long had trouble practicing what it preaches and that shortcoming extended (and probably still extends) to the dance floor. As far back as the 18th century, British cultural mavens were decrying the Waltz as "... the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced (we believe for the first time) at the English court on Friday last … it is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressor on the bodies in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the civil examples of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion." In America, World War I meant Johnny wasn't only exposed to trench warfare in Europe, but he also got to experience one or two French clubs and dance in ways deemed immoral and indecent back home. He likely heard black musicians playing syncopated tunes by performers like Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, and Sidney Bechet. They came home wanting to drink and play away the hidden pains of war and having a penchant for forbidden music.

But back home segregation kept whites separated from African American and Latin American performers and their music. Old taboo dances like the Fox Trot were updated to make them a little more jazzy, but it would take the final overreaching of the moralists to really bring African rhythms and syncopation to a broader and whiter audience. Prohibition aimed at eliminating the vice of drink from the land, but all it really accomplished was driving drinking underground. Gang-run speakeasies featured  African American musicians like Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and King Oliver. Every move to tighten moral control resulted in an equal backlash by youth culture: skirts got shorter, women bobbed their hair, men donned Harvard bags, slang became more outlandish, and dance got closer, more outlandish, and sexier. By the time World War II commenced, the proverbial cat was out of the bag and people were dancing the Lindy Hop and Jitterbug in Harlem on a Friday night.

And that brings us back to where I started, my own dancing. After experiencing the Ballroom version of the Fox Trot, Waltz, and (eventually) Tango, Kelly and I came to the decision that we wanted to learn something different. Just last year we began taking lessons in Cross-Step Waltz (a version that was common during the American Civil War), the Jazz-Age Fox Trot, and most recently a 20's era Valetino-style  Tango. In the coming year I'll try to give updates on what it's like learning these dances and our progress.

Cold Springs Resort, Hamilton, Indiana

Combining two things you love can be a fickle affair. If you read many of my posts, you're aware that I'm into local history. I spend hours dabbling in the subject: thumbing through old books and magazines, reading accounts of the past, and condensing them into what I hope are pithy little blog posts. You might not be aware that I'm also into dancing. I picked it up from my love of old movies. The first time I saw Rick's American Cafe in Casablanca with smartly dressed couples taking a turn on the dance floor while Sam hoarsely crooned Shine I knew I had to learn to dance. Eventually I did, though Vernon and Irene Castle won't be calling me anytime soon for pointers. It wasn't long after I'd learned to dance that I started seeking out historic venues where I could cut the proverbial rug. I've traveled as far as Salt Lake City to find an interesting dance floor where I could kick up the dust of bygone centuries, and most of the time it's come off really well...most of the time.

Like anything else, there are times when you attempt to combine two good things and they wind up creating something much less than the sum of their parts. Sometimes, the past is the past and there's probably a good reason it's nearly been lost forever. Consider our recent trip to visit a historic, Indiana dance venue that'd been in operation in one form or another since 1895.

Cold Springs Resort started out under the moniker Watkins Grove. It wasn't much more than a campsite in the northern Indiana plains, a place where sportsmen fishing the Black River could build a fire and bed down for the night. Fishermen could supplement their catch with produce purchased from the surrounding farmsteads or, if the fish weren't biting, buy a hot meal to dull the pangs of failure. Watkins eventually built a concession stand to cater to campers and even offered boat rentals to capture more revenue. In 1898, the same year "Remember the Main" became a rallying cry, Watkins opened a hotel and bowling alley on the site and Watkins Grove started to become a weekend destination.

At the turn of the century, cottages and boathouses were built along the shores of what then was called Fish Lake attracting renters came from across the Midwest. It was an escape for the ever-more-urban American population, a chance to get out of the city and away from the daily cares of your job and experience nature. At the resort you could start the day with a little fishing followed by lunch at the hotel restaurant and a little Sousa music, then you'd retire to your room to rest, write letters, and eventually change into your evening clothing and emerge for dinner and dancing. Entertainment ranged from speeches by key religious and political figures of the time (William Jennings Bryant spoke from the hotel porch, possibly during his 1908 presidential run) to baseball games between local teams such as the Hamilton Leaders, Edon Boneheads, Auburn Blues, and Ashley Grays. It was mentioned in the 1899 issue of the Indiana Dental Journal in glowing terms:

Indiana Dental Journal, 1899

This is where I always get myself in trouble, I forget that the past is the past and frequently doesn't reflect the present in any ways, shape, or form. In my mind they're still lighting Chinese lanterns in the dance pavilion while the band tunes up. Patrons file in, murmuring with the day's news and filled with happiness at having their cares drift away. If I close my eyes I can almost hear the music intermingling with the sounds of crickets and the baritone of bullfrogs down by the lake. Somewhere off in the distance the lonesome whistle of the St. Louis Flyer passing by the Hamilton station is a gentle reminder that summer isn't forever. Let's not get caught up in the dream just yet, though.

Success brought improvement and the hotel was rebuilt in 1914, becoming three stories high with twenty five rooms and electricity. In 1917 jazz supplanted the sound of clattering pins and the bowling alley was converted into a dance pavilion. Dancing in the early twentieth century, especially at a resort, was a seasonal thing. Like spring peepers, dance orchestras arrived when the weather warmed up and during the summer months you could dance at Cold Springs every night except Mondays from June 16th to Labor Day. In its heyday the Cold Springs dance pavilion played host to Woody Herman, Glenn Miller, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, and Artie Shaw and as the baby boom and rock and roll reverberated across the American landscape bands like the Beach Boys, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny and the Hurricanes came to the shores of Hamilton Lake.

With the fifth generation of the Watkins family running Cold Springs Resort, I expected to find a love and reverence for the past that preserved the hotel and dance pavilion in its prime, but you know what they say about assumptions. I guess a legacy can be a tough thing to carry on: if you cleave too closely to the past you wind up becoming a poor man's version of a theme park and too kitsch to be taken seriously, if you let things go they degenerate into a sort of half-preserved decrepitude like a patient clinging to life with the help of an iron lung. Unfortunately, the ladder applies to Cold Springs.

Looks like a place Norman Bates
would drink, doesn't it?

We arrived on Friday afternoon to find the hotel abandoned. Not a figure of speech, we couldn't find a soul in the hotel when we arrived. We tried the doors and found both the restaurant and bar locked. Some of the cabins near the hotel were falling down and the dock that ran out from the tiny beach listed uncomfortably to the port. The longer I stood in the drizzling rain taking in the scene, the more I began to wonder if I'd just wandered into the zombie apocalypse. Thoughts of arming myself and finding a defensible position started to pervade my thoughts. Worse yet I couldn't get a cell signal at all, meaning I couldn't try to look up the resort's number so I could call to make sure we were in the right place.

Before irrational fear could take over, we got back into the car and drove into Hamilton where we could make a call. It took a few minutes to find a gas station with a phone book, but that wound up doing us no good since the resort wasn't listed. Now we had two choices: we could turn around and start the two hour plus trip home or give the hotel one more try. We decided to give the hotel one last go, and when we got there we found that neon bar sign was lit. I descended the dank staircase half expecting to find Norman Bates and Michael Myers talking over their week over a beer at the bottom, instead after about five minutes of politely making "we're down here" noises  a woman appeared from upstairs, checked us in, and gave us the key to our room.

It was a room in the most rudimentary sense of the word. Yes, it had four walls and a ceiling, it contained a bed and a television, and there even was an attached bathroom. On the other hand we had no chair, coffee maker, extra pillows, toilet paper, shampoo, or wolfsbane to repel the lycanthropic attack I felt was sure to come once the sun went down. The mattress apparently had been de-boned by the last fisherman who'd stayed there and when you lay down on it you sank to the bed frame. The television had five or so television stations two of which were 24 hour weather and two others devoted to some fly-by-night televangelist and the signal constantly broke up due to bad satellite reception. In the spirit of respecting the past, though, we made the best of things. After all, back in the day there was no television to pass the hours, people socialized, wrote letters, and generally made the most of being together. How spoiled we'd become! That was the frame of mind I tried to adopt as we settled in as much as possible for a good night's sleep after a whole day of travel.

My good intentions failed about an hour later. That was when the bar directly below our room really started hopping. By hopping I mean singing Redneck Girl at top volume and by singing I mean they knew most of the words. We sat awake and listened as the locals, none of whom I saw while the sun was up, came out to make their revels. There was yelling, laughing, arguments, failed romantic trysts, loud discussions of the resort's storied history, and all manner of general noise. With each passing hour the room seemed to get smaller and the bed less comfortable. Finally I lost consciousness, not sure what time of night that happened, I'm just glad it did. The following day we resolved to spend as much time away from the room as possible and to forfeit our second night at the hotel for a late night drive back to Indy. We went to Angola, Indiana, visited a couple of wineries, and shopped at an outlet mall, returning just in time to prepare for a night of dancing at the pavilion. I'm glad to say where the hotel disappointed at just about every turn, the dance did not. 

Don't get me wrong, if you're looking for a fine example of well preserved turn of the century architecture the Cold Springs pavilion is not for you. Unless the management makes a concerted effort and does some serious maintenance, the lakeside dance hall will fall apart and be lost forever. At the moment it's balanced between shabby chic and depressive death spiral. The space itself is huge by modern dance floor standards; a broad expanse of hardwood surrounded by a gallery of tables for the wallflowers. The night's entertainment was The Junkyard Dogs, a fifties revival band that played hits by everyone from Chubby Checker to the Beatles. We danced until dripping with sweat and then bugged out before eleven to make the two-hour plus drive home to a comfortable bed.

The summary? Well, as a place to stay I don't recommend the hotel at the Cold Springs Resort. The price is cheap, that's for sure, but in my opinion, it's because the accommodations aren't really any better than sleeping out in a tent. It lacks too many things and is in too bad of shape. I hope that the owners will invest in returning it to its former glory and making it a destination, but at present it's a no go for me. On the other hand, the pavilion is definitely worth visiting. I recommend dropping in for dancing or spending a night in a nearby hotel and then driving over to swing the night away to the sounds of the fifties. One tip, get there early. Doors open around seven o'clock and seating is limited, if you show up late you could wind up standing the entire evening.

The Funnies - May I Have This Dance? (1920)

He: I was afraid you didn't like my dancing.

She: Oh, I would much rather dance with you myself than have you bump into me all the evening

Life Magazine, January 1, 1920

The Funnies - Call the Pound (1927)

Life magazine, December 1927