THE COWBOY WALTZ [From the New York Times Mag 10 Sep 1995 p.32,34]

>>If only we set off on the right foot, we might find a way to
connect to the West.<<

by Kathleen Dean Moore

[Kathleen Dean Moore is the author of "Riverwalking," a
collection of essays to be published this month by Lyons &
Burford.  This article is an excerpt.]


COUNTRY-WESTERN dancing could only have been invented on the
Great Plains.  It takes space, lots of space.  You can't dance
the Texas two-step in the living room, even with  the  furniture
pushed against the wall. You could Texas two-step the length of
Oregon in less than a week, dancing nights, sleeping under
junipers during the heat of the day.

     Frank and I are learning country-western dancing in the gym
at the Presbyterian church Thursday nights. One of our teachers
pulls out a microphone and tells us what to do. O.K. SWEETHEART 
POSITION. Couples face each other and grab hold. START WITH YOUR
RIGHT FOOT. EVERYBODY GOTCHER RIGHT FOOT? AWW-RAAHT. NOW.

 	She hugged me and kissed
	    me and called me her 
	    dandy;
	The Trinity's muddy, the
	    Brazos quicksandy.
	 I hugged her and kissed her
	    and called her my own;
	 But down by the Brazos she
	    left me alone.

     The first thing you learn in a country-western class is
dance-floor etiquette. The basic rule is keep moving or get out
of the way. Fancy stuff in the center of the circle. On the
outside, movement - fast, spinning if you want, but still moving,
counterclockwise. Ladies walk backward, men walk forward.

     The second thing is, the man is in charge. It's always the
lady who turns, moving fast so she's back in position when he
reaches for her hand, always the lady who moves her cowboy boots
double time, STEP, STEP, QUICK-STEP, - pointy toes, under-shot
heels, tiny things, sexy as hell. Backing away from her
gentleman, watching his jaw for the tightening muscle that will
tell her she's about to spin 360 degrees, a lady knows that when
he pulls her toward  him, he's  getting ready to flick his arm
and pitch her out, sidearm, like a stone skipping over a river.

     The men dance with hats on, the ladies without. The way the
lady ducks and tucks, a hat would get sent across the dance floor
first spin. Instead, the ladies wear hair. Texas-size hair curled
with a drugstore perm on pink rods so it sort of crinkles down
their backs. The men wear Levis and boots with two-inch heels
that boost up their rumps and bend their knees and give them a
swayback, swaggering stance like an out-to-pasture racehorse that
has won its share of races. 

     We don't really fit in, Frank and I. I think it's his fault
because he won't wear HIS of our his-and-her shirts. He
wears oxford-cloth shirts instead -- the only man on the dance
floor with white buttons instead of mother-of-pearl snaps. I
think I've got the clothes right, but I'll always have schoolteacher
hair. We're probably too stiff, too self-conscious,
the sort who would never make love with the horses watching. If
we had horses. Or maybe our politics are wrong. But how do they
KNOW we voted for gun control? How do they know that I don't let
dogs in my living room or that I get my back up when strangers
call me honey? When the music stops, the crowd parts silently
around us and rejoins, like a flock of sparrows avoiding a
telephone pole.

     We are immigrants to the West -- emigrants from Cleveland.
But we have lived in Oregon for 20 years now, and you would think
that would count for something. We brag about the West as if we
had created it; we plant trees and chop them down with an ax; we
seek out every isolated river valley and learn the calls of the
birds. But a sense of connection eludes us, and like other
immigrants, we live for those small, transcendent moments that
may exist only in the imagination, when we will belong completely
and perfectly to a way of life embedded in this land.  We are
taking intermediate dance, having taken beginning three times
before we got the courage to move on. We are learning the cowboy
waltz. This is familiar territory, so we don't have to think
about the steps. Instead, we can move to the music and listen to
the words, which are so hopeless that I waltz along with tears in
my eyes.

	 Li-li-li-lil-lil-ly, give me
   		your hand.
	 There's many a river that
   		waters the land.

     Real trouble doesn't come until they try to teach us windows. 
We're facing our partners and holding hands. We're supposed to start
moving our feet in the regular pattern. STEP, STEP, BACK-STEP! STEP,
STEP, BACK-STEP. Then the gentleman pulls  all four hands together
and - STEP, STEP, BACK-STEP -- lifts them over his head. By this time
he's got the lady strung up like a side of beef, and he pivots his
wrists, which means she must spin two and a half times, or her arms
will break off at the elbows. DON'T STOP MOVING YOUR FEET. Then he
lowers his elbows to shoulder level, and the two of them parade
around with their arms  framing  open  space that's supposed to look
like cabin windows with the glass shot out. Couples are frozen in
hellish contortions. Only the music moves on.

     The instructor snaps off the CD player, but it's too late. The
cowboys and ranch wives have already been transformed into
ordinary people like ourselves. Not cattlemen, not ranch hands, but
accountants and truck salesmen and nurses and, yes, professors, all
thinking that if they could just remember to start with their right
foot, if they could just put on their
ceremonial clothing and immerse themselves in the beat, they
would move their feet in patterns dictated by ancient practice
and the rhythm of slide guitars and find what they are looking
for.

     I want to be lifted off the linoleum of the gym floor and set
down, dancing, on a wood plank floor while a fiddler is sawing away,
keeping time with his hips, and a little cowboy is singing the truth
as he knows it. Ladies' skirts are swinging, and men are stomping,
and fat, pretty babies are sleeping on feather beds in the corners of
the barn, sighing in their sleep. Outside are wolves and droughts and
prairie fires, but we don't care because the air in the barn is
music, and music is whisky.

     Except that the janitor comes in and whispers something to the
teacher. She stops the music and asks if everyone would kindly remove
their boots, as they are making black marks on the
linoleum. Boots line up like hopeful teen-agers along the edges of
the dance floor. *