Doing the Achy-Breaky and Tush Push Well After Teatime

These may not be the best of times for the Mayflower Club, but hey, they aren’t the worst of times, either.

On one hand, it is true that the North Hollywood society of British expatriates and assorted Anglophiles has watched its membership slump to a low of 3,000--from a high of 10,000 in the mid-’70s--as dislocated Brits flee Southern California along with the aerospace industry and other recession-stung employers who provided their jobs.

But resourceful club leaders haven’t been caught completely on the hop. To boost membership, they’re taking the local expatriates to the country. Not to the Cotswolds, but to Appalachia and the lone, by-gum prairie.

In an interesting bit of reverse cultural imperialism, the Mayflower is now offering weekly country & Western line dancing lessons at its Victory Boulevard clubhouse in an effort to rustle up new, and younger, members. For just four bucks a night (2 1/2 quid, in these precincts), Fiona, Nigel and their friends can learn the boot-scootin’ boogie or the electric slide.

The question is: Is the walkin’ wazzie a sensible dance for a race that gave the world Oxford, sherry breaks, jury trials, ermine robes and Winston Churchill?

“It’s rather unusual, isn’t it?” one retired engineer observed dryly as he watched his wife do the decidedly un-Victorian tush push one recent evening, well after teatime.

For the English in the mother country, it might also seem a terrible example of cultural lese-majeste --a gross betrayal of principle that exchanges glorious blank verse mourning the loss of a kingly crown for banjo-backed couplets mourning the loss of faithful dogs, unfaithful wives and repossessed Winnebagos.

Certainly the ironic possibilities of the new club activity seem endless, especially to a people that has elevated irony into an art form. “Be still, mine achy-breaky heart,” William (Billy Ray) Shakespeare might have said, in trembling anticipation over the rich material available to his playwright’s pen.

But the British, displaced or otherwise, are nothing if not pragmatic, sensible as a pair of good walking shoes.

“You have to change with the times,” explained club founder Eileen W. Selby, MBE (Member of the British Empire). “Otherwise you die.”

Selby joins in, swiveling genteelly, pivoting and stomping in time. But the Colonial pastime somehow comes off looking slightly more refined than when Americans have a go at it.

Which might have something to do with the tempo of the song. Teacher Maria Heckathorn reveals afterward that instead of the standard “Redneck Girl” by the Bellamy Brothers, she put on the Judds’ “Have Mercy” for the tush push because of its statelier pace.

“We go a lot slower in this class than we do in our others,” confides Heckathorn, who with her husband teaches line dancing all over the San Fernando Valley. “It’s not something that they’re used to.”

Actually, some of them beg to disagree.

“Line dancing’s not totally Western. The Scottish and the Europeans do a lot of line dancing,” said Maye Despard, an Australian who has belonged to the club--along with many other British Commonwealth types--for 20 years.

“We’ve been doing the London slosh for years, and that’s a line dance,” Despard pointed out as she sipped sherry during a break. Plus, there was the Lambeth walk and the alley cat. “We just never called it line dancing.”

Despard attends the class with friends who are also past and present Mayflower ladies ( not “Mayflower madams,” if you please). Women vastly outnumber men among the 50 to 60 who show up each Wednesday, but the great advantage to line dancing is that no gender balance is necessary.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that so many British types are drawn to an activity that requires them to stand in line. Though the sun has long set on their empire, though British industry no longer dominates the world economy, though London Bridge now sits in Arizona, the British remain unsurpassed in their ability to “queue,” a trait bred into their bones by the ration lines during and after World War II (known as “the War”).

“An Englishman, even if he is quite alone, forms an orderly queue of one,” it has been written. According to the Financial Times of London, “Only the British queue properly. . . . It is a national characteristic.”

And sure enough, at the Mayflower Club, even while pushing the tush with attitude or doing a cha-cha with a poor sense of rhythm, the sons and daughters of the Thames Valley line up in even rows, displaying instinctive queuing precision. This was another reason the tush push had a more dignified air than it would at, say, the Buffalo Spit Saloon. That and the fact that nearly all the dancers were over 50.

Wait. What happened to all the young folk the lessons were supposed to entice to the club? Well, only a few showed up.

That didn’t surprise Marjorie Fitchew of Sherman Oaks.

“The young English people are bigger sticks in the mud than the older English people. They don’t know how to party,” said Fitchew, who operates a Canoga Park store specializing in British goods.

“The War brought us together. After the War, we really learned how to party. We can make a noise without a band,” she said.