Margin Notes: Dance Hall Days by Rachael Allen

It’s a Friday night after dinner and you’re ready to go out for the night. You take a car from Boston to a function hall in Revere. The space is beautiful — a ballroom with glass windows, hardwood floors, and a big band right in the center. To one side stand clusters of boys; on the other, clusters of girls. With each song, a boy ventures over to ask a girl to dance. He either takes her to the dance floor or traipses back to his friends, rehearsing his excuse for the rejection in his head. You stay out dancing for hours, going home around midnight. You’re ready to do the same thing tomorrow night, and the night after.

Rachael Allen

This dream sequence is how my grandfather describes his nights out when he was a teenager growing up in the North End almost 70 years ago.

“So did you talk to anyone?” he says recently, when I FaceTime him the night after my cousin’s birthday party. The question is straightforward, but the look on my grandfather’s face makes it clear that he isn’t asking just if I spoke all night.

“I talked to a lot of people,” I say, punting his question. I know what he’s asking. He wants to know if I met someone — the question that I wish I had a better answer for in this conversation. “Not everyone there was looking to meet someone,” I tell him. “It was just a party. We all talked.”

Cue my grandfather’s voiceover: It’s the late 1940s in Boston. At 18, my grandfather had been living for only two years with his father in a North End apartment, after coming over from Italy at 16. His father initially didn’t want my grandfather going out past dinner. Soon enough, though, a local priest who occasionally came over for dinner convinced him that it was alright if my grandfather went out with the other boys in the neighborhood.

On Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, they’d take the streetcar from Haymarket to Revere. My grandfather was in awe of the beauty of the space, which he can still describe in painstaking detail, from the shiny floors to the glass windows. He took as much care with his own appearance, wearing a suit and suede shoes. If someone were to step on his shoe while dancing, my grandfather would simply go to the restroom and take out the brush he carried to restore the nap.

Paying attention to one’s appearance was always important, but perhaps even more so when going dancing coincided with the hope of meeting a girl. Dances would depend on a boy asking a girl to dance. The boy would have to muster the courage to ask, again and again — not to mention figure out how to return to his friend group after being turned down. But if not that night, there was always the next one. And if not that one, then the next.

The simplicity of the arrangement, at least as how my grandfather describes it in rosy hindsight, sounds enviable. The night was built around meeting new people alongside your friends in a setting you were familiar with — compared to nights out today when the potential for romantic connection is not so guaranteed. “The first thing you’ve got to realize,” Dolly Alderton writes in her memoir Everything I Know About Love when counseling a newly single friend into the modern dating scene, “is no one meets in real life anymore.”

As much as I want to renounce dating apps for their troubles — the difficulty of assessing chemistry over text, the paradox of choice, the way dating becomes another form of productivity — they feel impossible to ignore. A Stanford professor’s study from a few years ago found that people are more likely to meet online than through personal contacts and connections; among my own friends in relationships, the vast majority met online. The reality is that dating apps have replaced dance hall days, both for better and for worse.

My grandfather describes his nights out as “freedom” compared to nights out today. He thinks he had it easier on the dating front, even though his dating days were cut short when he was drafted into the Air Force. But I’ve found freedom in my nights out, too. I can’t count the number of times I have gone out with my friends, and our hopes and expectations were nothing more than to enjoy each other’s company. If we met someone, great. If not, great.

It’s so easy to get caught up in hoping to meet someone, but at the same time I don’t want the pursuit of dating to define my life. After all, my grandfather didn’t even meet my grandmother when dancing. They met at church, when they were both going about their lives as usual.

Rachael Allen grew up in Canton and is now a writer and high school journalism teacher in New York.

Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=103621

Posted by Rachael Allen on Feb 10 2023. Filed under Featured Content, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.