Raging Teenage Hormones at Dancing School

Girls, go get 'em
Boys, let's rumba

--“The Legend of Miss Baltimore Crabs” from the musical Hairspray

 

Dancing school, an adolescent rite of passage, was forced upon me by my parents in 7^th grade. They believed learning to do the box step with girls my age on Friday nights would make up for my deprivation of exposure to the opposite sex during school hours. They probably thought it would make me heterosexual.

 

The formidable Florence Shapiro had been the grande dame of Cleveland ballroom dancing until her eponymous school was taken over in my day by Marilyn Bialosky -- an imperious, manners-driven martinet with a mean cha-cha. Even at thirteen, I knew there was a contradiction between the dire seriousness with which this despot of dance took her mission and the real reason the teens showed up in that Cleveland Heights hall. 

 

The dance lessons provided a pretext for letting out all those raging teenage hormones. Boys sat in a long row on one side, girls on the other, and Mrs. Bialosky would call on us to pick a dance partner from the opposite side. (A few years later, when I saw women sitting separately from men in shuls in Israel, it did not seem that unusual thanks to my dancing school experience.)

 

Bialosky was no fool. She knew her charges hated corny, old-fashioned forms of dance. The only reason she wasn’t faced with all-out teenage rebellion was that her school of dance provided titillation. Mrs. Bialosky was the real-life counterpart to Miss Baltimore Crabs herself, ballroom dance evangelist and flawed moral guardian Velma Von Tussle in the musical Hairspray. 

 

In the final fifteen minutes of class, all hell would break loose. As a reward for putting up with the boring ballroom blitz, we got a tiny bit of instruction in a more useful form of undulation: “modern dance.” 

 

Seeing Mrs. Bialosky metamorphose from square and sober to getting down with her bad self in that last segment of class was a revelation. She might as well have had multiple personalities or become demonically possessed. Before we departed, Bialosky cranked up Elton John's “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting,” and we teens also got to practice these moves. Unlike the preceding instruction, “modern dance” might be useful at the next high school dance.

 

At thirteen, I already knew I was different from other boys. I had even less use for the encoded titillation dancing school afforded than for the fox trot. My classmates feigned displeasure but not so secretly rejoiced at the chance to be with girls, while asking girls to dance made me feel like an anxious imposter. 

 

Around 8 p.m., boys and girls got their final glances at each other before our parents would pick us up and take us out for pizza at Geraci’s or ice cream at Draeger’s. Sometimes, we’d see groups of dancing school girls at these eateries. The bold among us would go over and say hi. The girls were doing the same thing as we were: gossiping, comparing notes, and above all, giving air to their attractions and opinions of who was cute enough to dance with the next week. 

 

After she finally admitted that the world had moved on from ballroom dancing, Marilyn Bialosky went on to a second career as a purveyor of American arts and crafts. I ran into her once or twice at her gallery. She brought the same stern haughtiness and unfailing eye to Americana that once belonged to her dancing days.

 

Mrs. Bialosky passed away in 2018. Teenage dreams have not been the same since she ruled the roost. 

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NOTE: My thanks to old friends Mitchell Loveman and Ellen Rome for their help reconstructing memories of dancing school days. After some spirited debate, I was able to establish that this all took place when we were in 7th grade.