“The Twist, The Stomp, The Mashed Potato, Too”
In which I realize the hidden power of knowing how to dance.
When I was in junior high school, we didn’t have American Idol or America’s Got Talent. We didn’t need them. We had Ronald Costo.
The school dances that I went to in junior high were held on the third Friday of each month. They were called “mixers,” because mixing was what the girls and boys were supposed to do. Mix while adults gaped at us. Of course most of us didn’t mix. Boys and girls clustered at opposite ends of the room, as if they were standing in line at school lavatories. Both sides snickered, the girls put their hands next to their faces and whispered in each other’s ears. The boys shoved each other. Eventually the girls danced with each other, and the boys did . . . nothing. The sock hop, with its enticements of minimal supervision, furtive making out, and outta-sight disk jockeys, was an idea whose time had not yet come to Danvers, Massachusetts in 1960. This was the year I was in eighth grade, sitting in wooden desks riveted to the floor, trying to figure out why there was a dried-up ink well on the right side of every desk. We’d been using ballpoint pens a full three years.
Ronald Costo was my schoolmate. Like the kid in this photo, he wasn’t what anyone would call “good-lookin.’” He was large and a bit paunchy, not quite fat but not in any way athletic. But he was always friendly and smiled at me, even after tests when no one else was particularly chatty, and he’d say stuff like, “Hey Pete, what’d you get for number two?” But he had a gift that all of us — wisecrackers, teacher mockers, and rough-and-tumble recess warriors — could only dream about. In the screaming words of The Contours[i], who catapulted their career with “Do You Love Me?”, Ronald could “really shake ’em down.”
He was the reason why mixers weren’t as bad as they could’ve been. Whenever a fast song came on at one of them, he would get out on the dance floor and gyrate. In a matter of seconds, he seized control: Everyone fell into line and started grooving to whatever dance he called out. It didn’t even have to match the song. He just did whatever he’d seen on American Bandstand[ii] that week. And he could do them all. “The Watusi.” “The Loco-Motion.” “The Swim.” He frugged as if an invisible gremlin were tickling him — he’d hold his feet together and move his hips right and left, flailing his arms. He shimmied as if some small animal — a kitten, a bat — had landed on his back and he was trying to dislodge it. He would shake his shoulders back and forth while holding his pelvis and legs nearly still. He even hitchhiked, wagging his thumb for the car that never came.
This talent made him immensely popular with the girls, who flocked to him like crows to corn. At one dance, every girl in my class lined up to do The Dovells[iii] hit “The Bristol Stomp” with him. Had there been dance contests back then, even regional dance contests, Ronald would have won them all. No question.
I was immensely jealous. More jealous than I had yet been of anyone in my life, even athletes like my favorite miler, Roger Bannister.
I was no slouch on the dance floor. I had attended Dorothy Darling’s Dance Studio for a solid three-plus years. I’d learned the waltz and fox trot, even the hully-gully, but that didn’t mean I could dance. Ronald was in another category. When he cut loose, he lost himself. What he had was passion, and when I tried to imitate him, every bit of that passion slipped from my grasp. I might as well have been trying to catch trout with bare hands.
Once my friend Steve and I tried to distract the girls from him. We were sitting on the beige metal folding chairs against the wall.
Steve turned to me, “My mother says you’re supposed to offer a young lady a cup of punch. Let’s do that.”
“Great idea.” I said. “See a punch bowl around?”
He thought for a moment. “Okay, we slip out to the corner store and bring back couple of cokes!”
“Really great idea! Got any money?”
“Nope.”
Instead of these tricks, I should’ve have gotten down on my knees and begged, “Ronald, teach me how. I’ll do anything. I’ll be your friend forever.” But I didn’t. I was way too dumb. That was the first lesson I should’ve learned from Ronald.
Ronald was also an amazing slow dancer. He did close slow dances, the kind my Catholic mother called “hugging set to music.” They weren’t cheek to cheek, but Ronald anointed them with another name — “head-to-head.” You weren’t pressing cheeks against each other, you were schmushing your right ears together. Real close, almost like you could hear what she was hearing. Later that year, when I’d finally landed my own girlfriend, Elizabeth Atkinson, I tried to head-to-head with her but she pushed me away, shaking her cute blonde head or maybe even her finger, I don’t really remember. She’d have none of it; she too was Catholic.
That’s a second lesson I should’ve learned from this master of teen dance: Make sure the girl you’re head-to-heading with is godless.
The last time I saw Ronald Costo was at the Holten-Richmond Junior High Cotillion Dance that May. I later learned that my father had attended one of those dances too, because he’d gone to the same school in 1928. It was where he’d learned to dance, or so he said. One night when I complained I wasn’t getting girls to dance with me, he said dancing was easy! He’d gotten so good he’d even won a contest his freshman year. Like I really needed to hear that.
At our Cotillion Dance, Ronald was pretty subdued at first because hey, it was a slow-dance affair. Near the end, someone snuck on the album 12 Top Teen Dances[iv] and dropped the needle on “Do The New Continental” (also by the Dovells).
Nobody knew that one because it had just come out. But of course Ronald did. He rushed out onto the dance floor and shouted through open palms, “Come on everybody, let’s dance!” The crowd got quiet and everyone gaped as he started dancing all by himself on the floor. As the dance instructed, “slide to the left, slide to the right” he slid to the left, he slid to the right, then he pivoted and stepped forward, swinging his arms like a giant marionette. He was alone for maybe ten seconds. Before the cut was over, everybody was dancing. Elizabeth seemed mighty impressed that even I’d tried a fast dance, because she knew how much I hated them. But I did a pretty good job of forgetting how lead-footed I was.
I tried finding Ronald on the Internet recently, but there were just too many Costos. I even took a chance and Googled “Costo Dance Studio.” I came up with zilch, then gave up. Maybe I really didn’t want to find him. Who would he be? A man like my father who’d used his unusual talent to land the girl of his dreams, only to hang it up until he had to fox trot at the next family wedding? No, it’s better that Ronald remain the permanent adolescent to me, dancing “with one hand waving free,” like Bob Dylan’s Tambourine Man. Recently I saw the Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance” again. It’s about a boy who’d had “his summer” and wouldn’t listen to his future self warning him about his future life. I hope the Great Dane of obligation never gnawed on Ronald’s dancin’ shoes, but I fear it may have, eventually. Kids like him sometimes blaze through our lives like summer fireworks, all red and green and loud, followed by the “ahhhh’s” of the crowd.
In the rarest cases, the acrid cordite and dusty ash residue they leave behind really does stick.
[i] Lead singer Billy Gordon addresses the listener directly in his spoken intro, unusual for the times. “You broke my heart / ’Cause I couldn’t dance / You didn’t even want me around / And now I’m back / To let you know / I can really shake ’em down.” Are there any socially clumsy boys (and girls) who couldn’t relate to this song? Unfortunately, few heeded this advice to learn to dance. “Do You Love Me?” was a million-selling single that became a major hit in 1962, then again in 1988. Gordon’s keening, raspy singing made the words sound urgent and poignant. The song doesn’t say how the young woman he was trying to impress reacted, but we assumed she swooned into his arms. Regrettably, the Contours never repeated this success. Although not exactly a one-hit-wonder group, they charted only in the R&B category for a few years afterwards.
[ii] An American music-performance and dance television program that aired from 1952 to 1989. American Bandstand featured teens “just like us” dancing to popular songs that were lip-synched by guest singers like Bobby Darin and Freddie Cannon. While many kids like Ronald learned the dance steps from watching the show, it wasn’t designed as a dance-teaching tool. I found the camerawork so shoddy it was hard to see the dancer’s feet. I remembered it being broadcast from 4:00–5:00 pm ET. It was hosted by Dick Clark, who stayed clean cut all the way through the turbulent later 60s, when many young people had long floppy hair. Most parents didn’t quite know what to think of him, since he was obviously a positive role model, but he did host that rock ‘n roll music, which many of them despised.
[iii] An American doo-wop group, formed in 1957. Since two of their members are still performing today, they hold the record for the longest active pop-singing group, surpassing even the Rolling Stones. “The Bristol Stomp” reached the #2 spot on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 singles chart in 1961. Its lyrics refer to kids dancing a new step called “The Stomp” at Good Will Hose Company dances in Bristol, PA. I could never get anyone to explain the line “The kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol.” How could a pistol be sharp? I hadn’t yet realized that rhyming could lead a songwriter deep into realms of illogic. For example, consider this 1967 hit by The Turtles: “So happy together / And how is the weather?” (“Happy Together”)
[iv] One of the first rock ‘n roll compilation records, released in 1962. 12 Top Teen Dances featured songs like “Bristol Stomp,” “Twistin’ U.S.A.,” Rocka Conga,” “The Fly,” “Do The New Continental,” and “Foot Stompin’.” Its single purpose: dancing. Only dorks like me listened to it sitting down. Chris Montez’s[iv] song “Let’s Dance” got it right: “Any old dance that you wanna do.”
