Ballroom Dance Catching On Again, Teacher Says

Catherine (Cay) Cannon can hardly contain herself when she talks about dancing.

“I think about it in my dreams, in the morning when I wake, at noon, at night and when I eat,” said Cannon in her Laguna Beach home. “I guess I love it.”

What she’s referring to is the current renewal of ballroom, swing, fox trot, tango and other similar dancing, the kind that requires the dancers to touch or hold each other. In earlier days she spent most of her time teaching dancing or participating in dance competitions.

“But wouldn’t you know the younger generation (people in their 20s and early 30s) seems to think the Big Band music now belongs to them,” complained Cannon, who teaches dancing at the Irvine Senior Citizen Center and gives private lessons in her home. “What they’re saying is that people of the Big Band era never appreciated the great sound.”

Although Cannon doesn’t agree with that notion, people in that age group are flocking to her dance classes at the senior center. “Sometimes we get as many as 150 dancers, half young and half old,” she said.

But Cannon, who once operated an Arthur Murray Studio in Laguna Beach and was California Tango Champion in 1958, said dancers in their 40s are still “doing the stomp, frug and twist and shaking their bodies all over the place. Ugh!”

She said those dances “never were really good, but it’s familiar to that age group, and they don’t want to let go of it. They’re trying to convince themselves that what they’re doing is fun.”

Besides the senior center and private lessons in her home, Cannon provides free dance instruction to people at restaurants that provide the Big Band sound for dancing.

When she sold her dance studio, Cannon became a ghost writer and worked for an orthodontist. “I made my bucks a long time ago, but I have to keep dancing,” Cannon said. “It’s not only fun, but dancing is one of the best forms of exercise.”

She feels the time is right for entrepreneurs to consider dancing as a moneymaker.

“Ballroom dancing went underground years ago, and now people who love that form of entertainment are starting to come out again,” she said. “I can see a tremendous rebirth and boom in that kind of dancing.”

So much, in fact, that Cannon is planning to open a cabaret complex in Newport Beach that will feature the Big Band sound and ballroom dancing. “In two years ballroom dancing will be the big thing again,” she said.

Jon Quan beat 14 other UC Irvine engineering students to win the title, “King of the Nerds.” He competed as a chess team cheerleader.

Honest!

It didn’t take Peter R. Koebler, 18, of Dana Point, long to decide that politics might be his calling. He was elected governor of the state YMCA Model Legislature held in Sacramento “and that really got me interested.”

He campaigned extensively, giving speeches at various YMCAs in the state, a political maneuver he no doubt learned at Dana Hills High School, where he was elected student body president as well as to various other positions.

After college, he plans on a political life, and the presidency is “the ultimate” he said, “but I’ll go as far as I can.”

Talks like a politician already .

Do you know how to spell “Nuisance” and “Pillar?”

Mathew Buchanan did and won the Anaheim School District sixth-grade spelling bee.

Acknowledgments--Don Sadler, 73, of La Habra, a member of the Retired Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) who has spent 600 hours in three years helping with the Meals on Wheels program, was honored by the Carnation Co. for his volunteer service. He received an engraved silver bowl.