VetOfTheSeasDown with gym class!
DagwoodIIIWhen they filmed the movie ‘Van Helsing’ in Prague they needed one hundred couples who knew how to ballroom dance. Everyone thought this was going to be difficult to set up, but it turned out that literally every extra they hired could waltz. Back in Soviet days, the country didn’t have a lot of money for sports equipment, but every school had a record player. They taught the kids ballroom dancing for the Physical Education requirement.
My middle school made us learn to waltz in gym class. I’m ass at it, but it was fun.
jqubedMy elementary school PE did a couple weeks every year where we did square dancing and line dancing. I guess that’s the southeastern US coming in. Sometimes we did some other more traditional English dance where the boys and girls would be in rows facing each other where there were some set steps and then the couple at one end would dance down between the lines to the other end, there would be more steps and then the next couple would move, and so on. It was like something out of a Jane Austen movie.
I learned square dancing in high school in Ohio. I was the only boy in a class of all girls, because I had broken my wrist and couldn’t play basketball. I would love to tell the story of how this helped me get girls, but I was much too big of a loser to take advantage of the situation.
You can thank Henry Ford’s racism for that.
No, really. He hated seeing his employees dance to jazz (which he blamed on Jewish people, because of course he did) so much that he pushed to have “proper” dances taught in public schools, dances that were old-fashioned even in his time.