Dancing Their Way to Happiness

It happens every June. Just like in the movies. As misty-eyed guests gaze on approvingly, the wedding couple glide onto the dance floor and into a faultless fox trot.

There’s just one catch: Today’s couples, having grown up with Mick, not Mantovani, may be walking to the altar on four left feet.

“Couples have been dancing apart for so long,” says dance teacher Jerry Neerin, “but we’re getting into an era of couple dancing again.” That means dancing together , with camcorders to immortalize every misstep.

So it was only a matter of time before dance lessons became a popular prenuptial rite, along with bridal showers and bachelor parties.

Some come to Neerin, who has been teaching dance for 20 years, currently at the Dance Doctor in Santa Monica or, for those who have space, at their homes.

On a recent evening, Glenn Miller plays “String of Pearls” as Neerin guides Jane Miller, 26, and Bart Henderson, 34, of Pacific Palisades through a swing step. It is toward the end of the 45-minute lesson and Henderson’s shirt is stuck to his back. “One, two, quick, quick . . . “ Neerin counts, nodding his head. “Whoops. Try that again.”

Now, it’s Beth Nielsen Chapman on tape, singing “All I Have.” Bart and Jane, who’ll be wed Saturday, have chosen this song for their first dance. They go through a routine Neerin has choreographed, ending with a dip--and a kiss.

Whose idea was this, anyhow, to spend roughly the price of a top-of-the-line refrigerator for dance lessons? Bart laughs: Our friends’. Adds Jane, “Every time we dance, we end up getting in an argument because I lead.”

Jane, who’s in video production, and Bart, who’s with a biotechnology firm, have known each other for three years, but the moment of truth came on a recent visit to a Westside club. The zydeco music started, she says, and “we decided we were in trouble.”

Six lessons later, they plan to really enjoy their wedding. Jane tells Bart, “Now, I can dance with your father. My father can’t dance, so it doesn’t matter.”

The wedding, with 150 guests, will be on a hillside in South Shaftsbury, Vt. There will be a tent with a dance floor and an orchestra, Coco and the Lonesome Road, which Bart and Jane describe as “kind of Vermont country-Western.” The couple now takes the Texas two-step in stride.

Neerin is sending them off confident that someday he’ll help celebrate their 50th anniversary. “It’s great preparation for marriage,” he observes, “learning how to cooperate on the dance floor.”

Not all of Neerin’s pupils dance out the door a la Fred and Ginger. “Given enough time, we can teach anybody,” he says, tactfully. “Some, of course, will come out looking a lot better than others.”

The basic lessons may include include swing, country and a waltz. And, of course, a fox trot--a real fox trot, not the foot-shuffling in place that Neerin dismisses as “the wedding waddle.”

He adds, “It’s a shame, really. Couples spend $1,000 or more for a good band and that first dance is something they’ll want to remember for the rest of their lives.”

Sometimes, watching his couples step onto the dance floor on their big day, he crosses his fingers. But he knows that, by the time the couple get to the reception, they’re so happy to have all the rest over with that they could tromp on one another’s toes “and they’re still going to be happy.”

Not So Wrong, After All?

“DAN QUAYLE WAS RIGHT,” screamed the Atlantic.

The magazine made the case that changes in family structure--including divorce and unwed mothers--are damaging the social ecology, threatening public order and pitting interests of adults against those of their children.

And the April issue quoted Stephanie Coontz, author of “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap,” as dismissing the life of the 1950s housewife/mother as one of “booze, bowling, bridge and boredom.”

But now here’s Coontz, a college history professor, stating in an L.A. talk sponsored by the feminist-socialist group Solidarity, that Quayle was at least a little bit right.

Coontz, a self-described radical, says the right wing is “tapping into a very legitimate concern” about families in disarray. She adds, “Too many radicals have defined adulthood as freedom from dependents. The inner childhood movement is a good example of that.”

But, she views the recent embracing of “family values” by Democrats as an alarming sign that, faced with a monumental urban crisis, they too want to blame it all--poverty, crime--on the collapse of the family.

In reality, she says, families have never been snug, self-reliant units. She points out that the ‘50s suburban family was “among the most subsidized in history”--with aid to small farmers, low-interest home loans, job training.

Suburbia prospered with this infusion of government money, Coontz adds, paving the way for the urban decay for which today’s middle class feels no responsibility.

Coontz asks why both liberals and conservatives today are defining morality and “family values” as taking care of your own. Period.

“By that definition, Mafia families could win the morality sweepstakes.”

Overheard

Tony Award-winning stage and screen actress L. Scott Caldwell, decrying the lack of good roles for black women in films during a recent panel discussion, “Mammies, Minstrels and the Blackface Fixation.”

As a child, Caldwell said, when she’d see a black woman in the movies, “It was a Hattie McDaniel. They were big and they were warm.” Today, “if you’re not a maid anymore, you can be the nurse.”

It’s as though Central Casting says, “OK, everybody, we’re looking for large black women--round up the usual suspects,” she says.