THAT'S MEN:Are today's men as embarrassed as we were?
DISTANCE MATTERS in the ballrooms of romance. I’m talking about the long walk across the floor to ask a girl to dance, an ordeal which was brought back to me when reading an account by architect Colm O’Riain on his blog. More on that in a minute.
Does this happen any more, I wonder? Does the present generation of young men have to summon up courage, whether fuelled by alcohol or not, to make that long walk across the daunting acres of the dance floor, a walk which may well end in refusal and humiliation?
Perhaps not. Nightclubs are smaller than dance halls, so I guess the walk across the floor to the lady of your hopes is a lot less daunting these days. I bet it’s still an ordeal, though, for a lot of guys who would never admit it.
My own forays down to the Dreamland in Athy, brought there in a CIÉ bus which returned me to the farm at about 4.30 in the morning, were exercises in embarrassment.
Today, I haven’t a clue why I travelled 20 miles each way in a bus smelling of fish, chips and alcohol to present myself to the young ladies of Athy and surrounding districts.
After all, if I had got lucky with one of them I couldn’t have done anything about it. I would have to have gone for the bus. And nobody had an apartment at the time, not in Athy anyway, so that was that.
In any event, I was terribly shy, and the whole business of approaching girls for a dance was excruciating. Most of them had the common sense to ditch me after the obligatory three numbers.
So embarrassing did I find the whole thing that I made a rule that I had to ask a certain number of girls to dance before I could stop asking and just relax and wait for the bus. I don’t really remember what the number was, but it could have been as low as three, which is kind of pathetic.
Colm O’Riain was going through the ballroom experience at about the same time. He and his brother made their first foray onto the ballroom floor during a charity dance. “The only real opportunity to make a romantic conquest to realise our teenager fantasies lay in the annual ‘Freedom from Hunger’ dance at the local ballroom which was sponsored by the town schools with the funds collected going to charity,” he recalls.
“Our parents saw this as a worthwhile ‘cause’ in supporting the alleviation of hunger abroad, but we saw it as a more immediate opportunity to satisfy our need to alleviate a more pressing ‘hunger’ being experienced at home.”
As was the case in many of the dance halls, no alcohol was on sale. And if it was, they probably would have been too young to be allowed to buy it. “Thus, when my brother and I decided to attend our own particular ‘Hunger Dance’,
we had the unfortunate prospect looming of a ‘dry’ night.” There was nothing in the house except a bottle of Blue Nun for visitors and a small bottle of Powers whiskey to be used only by the spoonful as a flu remedy.
But necessity is the mother of invention and he went off to the dance with a concoction made up of Blue Nun, Powers and lemonade to disguise it.
It worked. In the last slow dance of the evening, a girl called Mary “leaned over and gave me an almost imperceptible peck on the cheek. I have never before experienced such an electric fusion of sudden shock and sexual charge.”
That seems to have been as far as it went and when he returned home jubilant to tell his sister about his conquest, her response was: “Jesus, Mary had a little lamb. God, she must be hard up indeed.”
Colm O'Riain's account, titled A Blue Nun and a Devil Woman in the Ballroom of Romance, is at myplanarc.blogspot.com.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy
On Saturday at 1.15 pm, Padraig will give a short talk on mindfulness at an information afternoon organised by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy in the Mansion House, Dublin. Admission free