Photo by yours truly.
At lunch with a friend earlier in the day, we found ourselves discussing the relative coolness of our current president. I basically agree with my pal that Barack Obama seems like a pretty smooth dude, with good taste in music, an attractive wife, a decent jump shot, etc. But if I may say so myself, there is one thing the President is not good at: it doesn't seem like the dude can dance. I went to the Eastern Inaugural Ball in January, the last that the brand-new President and First Lady attended. And while it may simply be that he was zonked, Obama and Michelle sort of rocked each other back and forth until they'd gone around in a circle like middle-schoolers, but middle-schoolers who are actually comfortable touching each other. Joe Biden was still quoting Seamus Heaney at that hour, but POTUS had no moves.
It was fortuitous that this particular memory surfaced when it did, because I'm currently re-reading Katharine Graham's astonishing memoir Personal History (along with reading Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, in an effort to think more about what's going on with news as a profession and a public good), and as I was headed home from lunch, I hit the section where Graham talks about trying to learn the Twist so she could do it at the White House:
As the administration got rolling, Phil and I went to the first of several dinner dances at the Kennedy White House. These parties included exquisite women from New York and Europe, but old friends of ours, too, the Johnsons among them. We danced the twist--or attempted to. I found it impossibly difficult to learn and never really did, although my children tried to have me learn by stamping out cigarettes and drying myself with bath towels. Phil wasn't much better than I, but went at it with much more enthusiasm and natural energy--so much that at one of the parties his pants split horizontally across the rear. Early in 1962, Drew Pearson reported on the twist parties in his column, headlined 'They Twisted at the White House.' Pearson said that 'the big story social Washington has been buzzing about has not been U-2 pilot Powers, or the astronaut Colonel Glenn...but rather who leaked the news about the big White House twist party when even the Secretary of Defense, to the amazement of his generals, twisted and when the President himself danced until 4:30am.' The twist was thought to be rather daring, and some people were socked that it was being danced in the White House.
You've got to love it. I consider it rather a tragedy that dancing isn't considered one of the major social graces any more, that it's a novelty, or a hobby. Dancing is fun, it gets people doing something together in awkward situations, and I'm always astonished by how much people who can really dance well are transformed when they do it. I'd love it if the Obamas brought back dancing, just as they're bringing farming, and reasonably-priced fashion to the White House. But the President, for all his cool, will have to take lessons first.