Country Fever

Mike Bendavid was a disco guy in polyester pants and platform shoes until a friend dragged him to a country and western bar in 1978.

Now, this home-grown Jewish cowboy, who speaks fluent Hebrew and Spanish, dreams of rounding up enough line dancers on the tarmac at Van Nuys Airport on New Year’s Eve to break the Guinness world record.

Bendavid and his business partner, Marie Del Giorgio, are hoping to lead thousands in the “Electric Slide for Line Dance 2000,” one of five city-sponsored events to be held throughout Los Angeles to bring in the next millennium.

Bendavid and Del Giorgio were selected to lead the dance because of their connections in the country music world and their accomplishments on the dance floor, city officials said.

“I picked them because they had all the answers,” said Earl Sherburn of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, who is producing “2000 on Parade” at all five sites. “They could rattle off radio stations all over Southern California--in Riverside, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Orange--I didn’t even know they had western dancing in Orange County. They just have incredible knowledge about line dancing.”

On a recent Wednesday night at the Cowboy Palace Saloon in Chatsworth, Bendavid sat under a sign that read: “I’m Not a [Fake Urban Cowboy] I’m for Real.” He greeted the ladies as they walked by, and at 6:30 p.m. he pushed back his cowboy hat and sauntered to the front of the dance floor.

“All right, wild ones. Come on up here,” he said to a gaggle of women in cowboy boots.

The regulars lined up under the Confederate flags and wagon wheels adorning the walls. Bendavid rocked back on the heels of his new, ostrich-skin boots and started kicking, pivoting and shuffling as he called out the moves to the “Tumbleweed.” He moved slowly and smoothly, talking with a country twang.

“My mom’s a teacher at Cal State Northridge, and my dad’s a stockbroker,” he said. “My sister’s an attorney. I’m the cowboy.”

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Born at Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles and raised in the San Fernando Valley, Bendavid, 39, earned his bachelor’s degree at Cal State Northridge.

“I majored in history of the old West--cowboys and Indians,” he said.

When disco fever hit the nation in the 1970s, Bendavid became an enthusiastic convert. But he switched to country his first time out when a girl asked him to dance.

“She put her arm on me, and I thought, ‘Oh, you get to hold onto the girl,’ ” he said. “That got me hooked.”

Now, denim jeans, boots and cowboy hats are part of his daily uniform; he owns 15 pairs of boots and 10 hats.

“He comes to our meetings with a hat and cowboy boots on,” said Marco Duval, the city’s production coordinator for the Van Nuys event.

These days, the full-time dance instructor and part-time deejay teaches every day at the Van Nuys-Sherman Oaks Senior Citizen Center, the Organizational Needs for the Elderly in Reseda, the West Valley YMCA and the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center.

In 1999, Bendavid was named Country Music Deejay of the year by the American Disc Jockey Assn.

Bendavid and Del Giorgio, who met on a dance floor in 1980, own Mike’s Country Dancing. In 1995, they started the annual All Valley Country Dance Festival at Cal State Northridge.

Del Giorgio, who has long black hair that hangs halfway down her back, was a dancing fiend by age 7, when her father took her to a dance studio and she started taking Polynesian dance lessons. Today, she does tap, ballet, jazz, Hawaiian, ballroom and square dancing.

Bendavid was Del Giorgio’s first country dance instructor. Before long, she was helping him teach.

Like Bendavid, she teaches at clubs scattered throughout the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys.

Line dancing peaked in popularity in the 1980s and then faded, she said. But now, line dancing is back because of its accessibility to all ages.

“With other dancing, once you reach a certain age, you are pretty much done,” she said. “With this, everyone from young children to 80-year-old women can do it.”

Murray Acks of Canoga Park said he has dropped five pants sizes since he started dancing six months ago, and Joy Golden said she has lost 20 pounds on the dance floor and met her husband two-stepping.

“The only thing you need, Bud, is to smile,” said Steve Howerton, a regular in Bendavid’s class who hoped to make it to the new millennium line dance. “And when you got all these women out here flashing their stuff, you have got to smile.”

Bendavid and Del Giorgio chose the “Electric Slide” for Line Dance 2000 because the steps are easy and most line dancers know it. Bendavid likes to point out that the Electric Slide started as a disco dance, then worked its way into country and western circles. Regular line dancers say the spinning and sliding is addictive.

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Check-in on dance day at the Van Nuys Airport begins at 1:30 p.m., and rehearsal starts at 3 p.m. Instructor Ron Black will give lessons at 1 p.m. in a hangar, and Line Dance 2000 will start at 3:30 p.m., Sherburn said. Mayor Richard Riordan plans to drop by during rehearsal and then head over to San Pedro for some drumming, Sherburn added.

The number of people who have signed up to dance is fast approaching 1,000. “We just got 49 faxes from the Inglewood YMCA this morning,” Sherburn said Friday.

As organizers strive to hit their goal of 2,000 dancers on the airport tarmac, Bendavid is more ambitious. He hopes to break the record of 5,502 set on Jan. 25, 1997, in Tamworth, Australia.

“I’d love to have someone from the Guinness Book of World Records there to count them,” Bendavid said. “But I don’t even know who to call.”

For information and applications, call (213) 847-0015, Ext. 5. Applications will also be available on site Dec. 31.