Let's Twist Again Like We Did Last Century

When I was a boy we had a Victrola up in the children's playroom, but what I remember most of all was mother joining us to wind the mechanism up, put on "You Are My Lucky Star" from Broadway Melodies of 1936, if I remember rightly, and sing along with the music while the tears rolled down her cheeks.  She was thinking of my father, her late husband, whose death that very year put an end to the fun, merriment, and music which she always implied was the daily fare of life with Daddy.  I got into phonograph records myself early on when I went off to Andover, buying them in prodigious quantities, although we were not allowed machines to play them on in the dorm, nor indeed did I manage to pay for them.  It was another era, and storekeepers assumed the young gentlemen would make good, which indeed I did, after an enormous scene over the telephone, an instrument usually available only to announce a death, with my mother sternly and harshly taking me to task for my wayward, spendthrift habits.  All these 78" shellac records somehow made their way to Iowa without breaking, and in the next eight or so years were joined by literally about two thousand others.  I had discovered Dixieland Jazz, and learned that I could do my homework with the music blaring right into my ear.  Then I went to graduate school at Harvard, and Cambridge forced me to give up my loose ways, and I discovered eighteenth century music, and realized that Beethoven and Brahms were too heavy for my refined tastes.  Bach's Goldberg Variations was just about perfect.  The children arrived, and the house rocked with the Beatles and the Supremes, perfect for shimmying around the kitchen, martini in one hand, plates of macaroni and cheese in the other.  And later when I was living alone a young man entered my life whose severity coupled with demonstrable genius in music, art, and drama left me speechless.  He vetoed the background music on the phonograph--"either listen to music or don't, but give it respect and attention."  Gee, he was right; now my house is silent as the tomb.  "Disgusting," says my trainer at our Florida gym, a Bronx born American of Puerto Rican ancestry.  "You should have music on all the time, you should dance.  Come with me; we will take you to a place where you can learn salsa."  "No, no," he protests, "never too old for salsa, for music, for dancing."  I remember when I taught college in the Bronx, and stepped from the D Train at some stop up near the Bronx Botanical Garden, and as I walked the five blocks to my job, I was assaulted almost physically by the intensity of the music pouring out of the windows of every apartment on the street, from the cars driving by, shaken by the thudding and booming, by the piercing cry of the horns, shuddering as I noticed how many people turned their speakers to the world outside, oh, such a perversity.  On Puerto Rican Day I told my students that I could only live among WASPs.  No, no, I was not racist, I said, could not take the noise.  If there were WASP Day, I told them, the ranks of marchers would each carry a martini and not a sound would be heard, not a word spoken.  Ah, WASP day!  They say that the public address systems of Pennsylvania Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal are programmed to play only classical music because teenagers and vagrants will not congregate or stay near where they must listen to such music. I know that whenever I get my car back after it has been in the shop the radio has been changed from 24 hour classical to something with a loud driving beat interrupted by endless chatter, as though the repair man could not work listening to classical music.  Well, it is true I could not drive listening to that horrible stuff he chooses.  But I have to say that somewhere in the fluff of my forgetfulness lies the provocative recollection of years of teenaged jitterbugging, then being thirty and doing the twist, and forty and disco, disco, not to forget the fox trot, (it brought my husband and me together) and the waltz dance steps forever .  Yes, once upon a time I could have danced all night, and the thrill of it was just enkindled in me vicariously as I watched the London staged musical version of the 1935 film "Top Hat" Irving Berlin's confection made for Astaire and Rogers.  If it comes over here, don't miss it, is all I have to say.