Canadas at Play: Nightlife in 2000

Square Dancing

April: About year ago, we received an invitation to come and square dance at a club here in Laurinburg. Although neither of us had promenaded or do-sa-doed since elementary school, we accepted. For the first few weeks, the caller used to step up to us and drop little bits of square-dance trivia. "Did you know," he would begin, bypassing any attempt at casual conversation, "that square dancing burns more calories than water skiing?" I showed the appropriate amazement. A little later that night or the following week, he would corner one of us again. "For people in their 80s," he would say, "square dancing is the number-one contributor to a healthy mind." I don't remember the exact facts, but none carried much weight with me--an exercise fanatic still decades away from retirement. If Charlie had known me better, he would have said, "You will learn something new every week."

For someone who loves to learn, that promise would have been the best enticement anyone could have offered, and it would have been true. Since joining the club, we have learned something new--and sometimes four or five new things--at most of the meetings. We still have a long way to go. After all, thanks to Charlie, we know that square dancing has more than 4,000 steps, about 3,998 more than we learned back in elementary school. Still, at least for me, there is something very satisfying about hearing the words "flutter wheel" or "load the boat" and knowing exactly what to do. On top of that, we have made some wonderful new friends and had a lot of fun. We even have attended a few regional dances and performed at a local rest home on Valentine's Day.

Of course, there is a price to education, and we have paid it. Through my 12 years of public schooling and even my college years, I had largely avoided it, but eventually my luck ran out. I'm talking, of course, about hazing, square-dancing's secret sin. On the night of our graduation, the night when we would earn our green-and-white name tags, we endured a harrowing initiation ceremony that involved, among other things, wearing cardboard boxes while we performed the "box circulate" and going through an entire dance with blindfolds on while a pan of shaving cream reportedly was in the center of the square. Now we know why all those octogenarian square dancers are so sharp. They have to be.

Books

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson

May 2000: I picked up a nice hardcover edition of this book at a discount bookstore in Indianapolis while we were visiting my parents, and I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It is a classic Gothic story and one of the world's most famous books, of course, but it also is a good read. I was attracted not only to the engaging story, but to Stevenson's streamlined style, which makes his prose a pleasure to read. Perhaps it was this same combination that made Stevenson's Treasure Island and Kidnapped two of my favorite books when I was growing up. While it starts as simply a good yarn, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde develops into a provocative examination of human nature. In a letter to an associate Dr. Jekyll confesses that had two sides to his personality even before he began conducting his chemical experiments; indeed, it was this dual nature--one side upstanding and the other carnal--that led him to "dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements." He goes on to explain: "If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin, and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of his extraneous evil." In its exploration of humans' "dual nature," as well as other themes--the conflict between good and evil, for example, as well as social conceptions of what is natural and what is civilized--Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is much more than a good horror story.