Looking for a Maxixe? Try a Tea Dance
I was in my teens when âboogie-woogieâ became a white-hot fad and we had big hits like âThe Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B,â âThe Boogie-Woogie Washerwoman,â âCow-Cow Boogieâ and dozens of others. Among my old 78s was a number called âBoogie-Woogie Maxixe.â
Iâd never seen the word maxixe before, and I was fascinated by it. I canât think of another word with xix in it. Websterâs New International says that maxixe is properly pronounced âmasheesha,â with âmakseeksâ as a second option.
Like the grizzly bear, the bunny hug and a slew of other dances, the maxixe had its heyday before my time. Those dictionaries say that it is a Brazilian dance in two-four time, resembling the two-step.
I bring it up now because a couple of months ago, at a Sunday afternoon tea dance at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, our friend Marion Zola asked me if I knew what the mashie was. I told her I thought it was a passe term for one of the slope-faced golf clubs. âNo,â she said, âitâs a dance. A guy just asked me if I could dance the mashie.â
At last, after all these years, I could actually use the word in a sentence. âHe must have meant the masheesha,â I said, suddenly feeling very 1920s continental.
Looking about the dance floor, I noticed a few couples doing what appeared to be a fancy Latin-American version of the two-step. Most of the dancers were just having a ball swinging and stepping about in two-four time, an easy rhythm to fall in with; but the couples who were actually doing the maxixe looked, every one of them, like Fred and Ginger.
Ian Whitcomb leads the orchestra for the Rooseveltâs Sunday tea dances. Heâs an English musician, composer and writer. Iâve learned that he was a rock star about 20 years ago, thanks to his smash âYou Really Turn Me On,â which is evidently remembered with nostalgic fondness by a great many people who are much younger than I. He abandoned rock after a time and is now a leading authority on ragtime and jazz. Heâs just finished writing a book on Irving Berlin.
Tea dancing combined with Whitcombâs quintessential Britishness reminded me of London in August of 1952, when I found that the local English Palais de Danse advertised their Sunday afternoon The Dansants instead of tea dances. Evidently the Brits thought of tea dances as an exotic continental fancy.
Later, living in France, I was surprised to find that the Parisian dance palaces advertised Tea Dancing , usually pronounced âtea don seeng.â They apparently considered tea dances to be as British as tea and crumpets.
The most recent tea dance we went to at the Roosevelt, last Sunday, was jammed, and, to our delight, jammed with people of all ages, from about 2 to 90--no kidding. And we danced the waltz, the tango, the hokey-pokey, the shag, the foxtrot, âthe one-step, two-step, every kinda new stepâ (I think thatâs a line from âIâm a Dingdong Daddy From Dumas, and You Oughta See Me Do My Stuffâ).
I asked a couple of young people about the popular dances of their generation. They said there are no identifiable dances; itâs just a question of moving to the beat, sort of ad lib. That, I suppose, is the essence of dance: moving to the beat.
The youngsters I talked with said they were trying some of the more traditional forms of ballroom dance, with some of their exotic rhythms, and thoroughly enjoying them. They looked it, and they looked great.
I wouldnât be surprised if they started developing new steps, new variations, even new beats, and giving them new names before long. Maybe better than âthe grizzly bearâ? âthe bunny hugâ? âtruckinâ on downâ? âthe Susie-Qâ?
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