Students from Towson University's Ballroom Dance Club dance at Friday Night Swing at the American Legion.
By Rachel Beth Ahrens
It started when Chuck Alexander’s wife left him for another man in 1980. It was upsetting at first, but he found a way to get over it soon enough.
“It was the best thing that ever happened to me, though not at the time,” he said, gesturing to the crowd of dancing couples across from him. “Look, this is because my wife ran off on me.”
The lights were dim and men and women danced across the wooden floor to a slow blues tune performed by the band The Fabulettes, which had the girl group sound of the late fifties and early sixties. Most of the couples were dressed in suits and dresses for the occasion, which was prom night, and some people were just wearing jeans and tee shirts. All the men would have to do after the song ended was to go up to a woman sitting down in a chair against the wall and stretch out a hand. And she would take it for the next dance.
Alexander, 65, teaches swing, ballroom and Latin dances four nights a week. He teaches in Towson every Monday and Tuesday, in Columbia on Wednesdays and in Severna Park on Thursdays. He’s been dancing and teaching people to dance for nineteen years.
“I enjoy doing what I do,” he said.
The Friday Night Dance Club is a group that holds a weekly event called Friday Night Swing at The American Legion on York Road behind Papa Johns. Many people of all ages from the Baltimore area pay $12 to dance from 9 p.m. to midnight. They also hold classes for swing, ballroom and Latin dances, including rumba, meringue, salsa, cha-cha, waltz, tango and others.
With the dancing events held on Friday nights, everyone is welcome and there’s no competition.
“We really, truly are not a competitive ballroom dance club,” Alexander said. “What we are is a social dance club. The importance is that people get to dance with each other and we change partners all the time here.”
Many couples of all ages and backgrounds swing dance right by the live band.
The start of dancing
However, it didn’t start at the current locale. It began at the ROTC building at Johns Hopkins University. After they outgrew it, they moved to the Boumi Temple on Charles Street in Essex. Then Loyola bought the place and Friday Night Swing moved to several other locations.
“We had to move almost every week,” Alexander said. “But the guys here at the American Legion offered us to stay here every Friday night. And we’ve been here every Friday night for three years.”
One of the dancers who’s a regular at the dances is John Patzschke, 54, who had been dancing for about nine and a half years.
“It’s something other than swimming and it’s a social expression,” he said. “You have to use your thinking cap to do the dance.”
College students welcome
If that wasn’t enough, students would also come to dance for a $2 discount. Most Towson students would normally go home for the weekend or stay in their dorms on Friday night, but not sophomore music and English major Rebecca Schiavone, 20. She attends Friday Night Swing most weeks ever since she came to Towson University’s Ballroom Dance Club meetings.
“Swing dancing is rather addictive,” she said.
Like the Friday Night Dance Club, Ballroom Dance Club at Towson is another group that promotes social activity and education of ballroom dancing, holding meetings every Tuesday night from 9 to 11 p.m. Junior music education major Emily Shevell, 21, said she wasn’t interested in joining at all at first, but she eventually became the president of the organization.
“In my freshman year, I got dragged to Ballroom Dance Club kicking and screaming,” she said. “I never wanted to go. Then I fell in love with it and kept dancing.”
After a while of going to meetings, the president dropped her spot and the vice president became the new president. Thus, Shevell decided to take over as the new vice president.
“Then re-elections came and I decided, hell, why not go for president?” she said. “So I did, and I got it, and I love it. I love seeing what people want, figuring out how they work and who they need to teach so I can figure out how to make the club better.”
The live band The Fabulettes perform at the Friday Night Swing event. The group has been together for 14 years and they mostly play music from the 1950's and 60's.
So why come to Friday Night Swing if Ballroom Dance Club has regular meetings and students can dance all they want to on Tuesdays?
“I get to come and dance and show off and it’s a lot of fun with no pressure,” Shevell said. “You show up, you pay $10, you dance all night long, you go home, you go to bed.”
“I enjoy the challenge of dancing,” said e-business and computer information systems major Mike Scribner. “It’s a good three hours of exercise, and sometimes three or four nights a week.”
But that’s not all students do on Friday nights when they show up at the swing dance. Some of them go to the Towson diner up the street from there.
“The waitresses know us,” Shevell said. “And the whole group goes, especially after Friday Night Swing because your metabolism is up through the roof, so you can eat whatever you want and not get fat.”
Monday Night Swing
On the other hand, Scribner said that Friday Night Swing wasn’t the only place to go for dancing in Maryland. There’s a group called Charm City Swing, which holds swing dancing on Monday nights from 9 to 11:45 p.m. at Little Texas in Rosedale. The clientele are younger and it’s a “good time to show off.”
The only difference is that the place primarily does a different type of swing called lindy hop. Lindy hop differs from regular swing by having eight counts instead of six. Rather than going, “slow, slow, quick-quick” with a dancer’s feet in swing, it would be “triple step, step-step, triple step, quick-quick” in lindy hop.
“It’s an awesome time and it mostly has people my age,” Scribner said. “There’s a little more interesting things to talk about.”
There are a few things that make it difficult for students to fit in.
“There are a lot of people there who are really experienced,” Scribner explained. “It’s really difficult to approach some of these people because they’re just so good and they’re usually dancing the whole time. And you feel kind of awkward, especially as a lead.”
Compared to Charm City Swing’s weekly event, Friday Night Swing is probably best because it’s more laid back and people are more social, according to Scribner.
The dancers are also experienced in other dances as well, according to one of The Fabulettes’ singers, Esmirelda Grecco.
“At some places where we play, a lot of people only know swing or only know foxtrot,” she said. “The dancers here at Friday Night Swing are more versatile, which is nice.”
She also teaches dance besides playing gigs with her band. There are a few people who she goes to when they need private lessons, and she teaches at Laurel, Columbia and other different places in Maryland.
“I can teach all kinds of stuff,” she said. “I can teach swing, I teach a lot of Latin dancing, pretty much a lot of different types of dance. But mostly these days, I teach swing and Latin.”
Still, she did not get to dance as much at the weekly event during the live band’s breaks. Other than that, she enjoys fixing her hair into a beehive style up-do and singing the first soprano part in the group that plays music from the fifties and sixties.
“Beats working in an office, in my opinion,” she said.
Slow, slow, quick quick…
For Alexander, dancing has always been a passion and a social interaction. He has tried to get into the competitive world, but it wasn’t meant to be.
“I used to compete and I decided that wasn’t for me,” he said. “So I learned from several different people and I had several different partners.”
“For the last ten or fifteen years, I’ve been teaching with one of the better ballroom teachers in the country and he teaches my classes with me,” he said. “And I learn from him, too.”
As the night wears on, people continue to dance. Men offer women a hand, they take it, and they dance for the next song. One Towson student was dancing with a girl who wasn’t his girlfriend, spinning her around and pulling her close on the crowded dance floor.
“In the social dance aspect, the big difference is that the guy leads everything,” Alexander said. “And that enables him to dance with many different women who have trained in many different places, whereas with a straight ballroom dancing, you pretty much have to dance with one partner.”
Therefore, the most important thing in swing dancing at this club is to meet people and have fun.
“It’s the joy of dancing,” he said.
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