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I was hired as a dance instructor, but I ended up a gigolo. BY MAC MONTANDON 243-2122
EXT. 349
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Occasionally my girlfriend approaches me with her arms out. She says nothing, but I know what she wants. When she walks silently toward me in this position, my girlfriend wants to dance. The foxtrot, rumba, tango or waltz--she isn't particular.
Unfortunately, I cannot help her. When I see her arms stiffen into this
dancing posture, I become paralyzed with fear. My feet won't budge.
Like Laurence Harvey's character in The Manchurian Candidate, who became
hypnotized every time he saw a queen of hearts playing card, I had a
sordid experience that has left me with psychological shrapnel. Last
year I worked as a ballroom dance instructor.
Desperate for work, my girlfriend and I were intrigued
by a classified advertisement that sang, "Come dance with us." The ad
briefly explained a dance school's need for teachers, asking only that
applicants be well-groomed and pleasant. What helped seal the deal were
three simple words at the bottom of the ad: "No experience required."
We called right away.
The hiring process was a strange, emotionally grueling affair. We attended four-hour classes Monday through Friday for two weeks without pay. The tryout crew also included a pretty, young French-Haitian woman, an older den-mother type and a party girl ("See you tomorrow at beer-thirty"). During this training period we were shown both how to dance and how to "sell the dances"--that is, hook the students into further lessons at higher prices. The five of us bonded until the last day, when the manager called us individually into her small airless office to tell us if we made the cut. "Of course you did, honey!" she said to me as soon as
the door was shut. I felt as though I had really accomplished something.
Then I found out that the den-mother and the party girl hadn't been
hired. If I had any confusion about the studio's criteria for employment,
that day cleared everything up: Only the cute survived.
The studio consisted of two rooms, the larger the size
of a high-school classroom. The "junior ballroom" was a converted office.
The walls of both rooms were lined with mirrors; nearly all remaining
space was plastered with brightly colored handmade signs telling of
upcoming events. As Christmas approached, an incredibly long strand
of festive lights was twined around the ceiling of the larger ballroom.
At night the studio, with the lights twinkling and reflected
endlessly by the mirrored walls, looked like the cabin of a spacecraft
broken free from the mothership and drifting soundlessly into another
dimension.
My girlfriend and I enjoy dancing to pop music (and she
can get down on the ground in a cocktail dress and do "the worm" like
nobody's business), but ballroom dance is another animal entirely. In
short, no one has ever confused us for Fred and Ginger.
"The foxtrot is a get-to-know-ya dance," the manager would
say pleasantly, taking a fellow instructor by the arm while demonstrating
how to teach a newcomer. "It's a walk through the park. A fun dance.
The tango, on the other hand, is a cat-like dance." The bulky woman's
eyes would suddenly turn serious. "The tango is a quarrel between lovers."
I found myself saying these lines to new students--usually verbatim, with passable enthusiasm--hundreds of times during my three-month career as an instructor. Thankfully, the studio only let me teach the introductory lessons. These lessons cost $30 and were designed to show a new dancer the most rudimentary moves. They were also meant to hook an unwitting student into larger, more expensive lesson packages. After the first three half-hour lessons, a student could move on to take four hours of lessons for $200 to $300. Our manager routinely boasted that she had assembled the most attractive staff of any ballroom-dance studio; thus we were providing a justifiably expensive service. There were six full-time male instructors and four female instructors. The oldest among us was a fellow in his mid-30s. One other male teacher came to dance with students at the weekly guest parties--scripted affairs, replete with dimmed lights and champagne, designed to recruit friends of students. The studio needed more male than female teachers for the simple reason that the student body was made up almost entirely of sweet old ladies. My girlfriend's dad, when inquiring about work, needed only to ask, "And how are the Gladyses?" There really were a couple of Gladyses, as well as a Betty and some Helens. Most of the regulars were in for lessons a couple of times a week; one of the Gladyses seemed to be there Monday through Friday and probably would have come on Saturday and Sunday if the studio had been open. When I recall the dance parties, holiday parties or any number of events that brought several students into the studio at one time, I see a slow, twirling, ambitiously blushed procession of doughy visages. Instructors traded off students, and the franchise owner introduced the next dance: "Teachers, find another partner for a rrrrrrrumba," he'd half-squawk into a microphone, then hit "play" on the studio sound system. Syncopated beats started up, and young bodies led older ones in a sexy, grinding box-step. I dreaded the parties--my mind frantically counting steps while I tried to maintain a dignified veneer--and I particularly loathed the rumba. While leading a foxtrot, waltz, tango or swing I could play-act at being the dapper gentlemen out on the town with his mother. But the rumba--with its slinky steps and close position--made one thing perfectly plain: I was, in many ways, just a gigolo. During the rumba I could feel my partner's warm, stale breath on my face; I could sense expectant eyes steady on me, even as I tried to maintain proper dance position by gazing intently over my partner's right shoulder. It was worse for my girlfriend. The women instructors were required to wear loads of makeup, flashy earrings and skirts and dresses cut to show a lot of leg. It took them well over an hour to prepare for work, and when they were done, they looked like the jewels of a Russian bride mail-order catalog. Usually the male students (mostly lonely older men) could control themselves, but a few let their fast hands fall south, caressing the lower backs of their teachers. The women instructors were advised to return the men's hands to the shoulder area when this happened, and if it happened repeatedly, they were to find the manager. Still, wedding rings were not allowed at work. We called over Christmas break to say we wouldn't be returning
to work at the studio. The main reason was because we felt like poorly
paid prostitutes. We had become only decent dancers, though we worked
hard to learn the steps, and it was obvious that our only asset to the
studio was our scrubbed youthfulness. The students, especially the sweet
old ladies, were spending a small fortune on lessons--many spent several
thousand dollars in the three months I was there--and it made me sick.
Egging me on to quit was information a friend showed me from a 1968 lawsuit against another company, the Arthur Murray School of Dance. A Florida woman successfully retrieved some of the $31,090.45 she had laid out for 2,302 hours of dancing lessons. The woman claimed she had been falsely led by her instructors to believe she was improving. For 40 hours a week I was paid a "guarantee" of close to $200. Experienced teachers made considerably more by procuring a percentage of everything they sold, including dance lessons, trips, competitions and appearances with their students in "showcases"--gaudy nights at the local Elk's lodge, where family members paid $10 a ticket to see their moms and grandmas move stiffly through choreographed numbers.
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