Line dancing: One of the signs of the world's end


May 9, 2000

Have you ever read the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible that talks about the end of the world? It says that in the final days before the apocalypse, all sorts of bad stuff is going to happen.

We've already seen some of the calamities foretold in the Book of Revelation. Earthquakes. Floods. Newt Gingrich. The Spice Girls. Well, I have seen yet another heinous sign that the end is near, one that is even worse than Kathie Lee Gifford.

I am talking about line dancing. This is something that only Satan himself (or maybe Kathie Lee Gifford) could have thought up.

Anyway, I first encountered line dancing because a good friend of mine, Christina, enjoys it very much. With all due respect to Christina, I now think she has serious mental problems.

For those of you who have never experienced line dancing, I will now try and describe it to you. Imagine a bunch of people, dressed in Western-style attire, some of which is so tight that blind people, from great distances, can see private bodily parts in graphic, disturbing detail. Now, give these tightly clothed people beer, and teach them a dance which repeats itself, over and over and over. Finally, put these people on a dance floor, and pump in country music with a bass level generally associated with a Boeing 747 engine.

That, folks is line dancing. If this sounds appealing to you, please put down this newspaper and seek professional help immediately.

I first encountered line dancing one night when I accompanied Christina and some other friends to The Garage, which is a club located in the Reno Hilton. Unbeknownst to me, The Garage was sponsoring line-dancing lessons. Before I knew it, I was coerced onto the dance floor, and I was learning to line dance.

Before I go on, let me explain something about myself: I am a white, male journalist, and as a species, white, male journalists have as much dancing prowess as Kenmore refrigerators. Despite my best efforts, I don't dance; at best, I rhythmically waddle.

As I stepped on to the floor, a short man wearing alarmingly tight blue jeans and a cowboy hat started showing us the steps to some dance which had a stupid name. (Line dances, by the way, are known for stupid names. Some examples, which I am not making up: the Jose Cuervo and The Stroke, which is done to a song with the following lyrics: "Stroke it to the left, stroke it to the right...")

Anyway, tight-jeans dude would show us four or eight steps, then make us do them in extremely slow motion. People walking by The Garage probably started laughing so hard watching us that they had problems maintaining their balance. We danced in slow motion, doing the exact same awkward dance steps, as if we each were trying unsuccessfully to step around our own personal piles of cow manure.

In survived that night, and vowed never to have anything to do with line dancing again. I mean to keep this promise, but somehow, on a recent evening, I found myself at a country bar called Rodeo Rock, where everyone was -- you guessed it -- scraping cow manure off of their boots.

No, seriously, they were line dancing. Folks, I have never seen a more tragic commentary on today's society than I did on that night as I watched drunk folks in cowboy attire wander around, in unison, stroking it to the left, stroking it to the right. It was like some evil cow had put a spell on them, converting them into dancing country drones.

It was just wrong.

Despite all the line dancing, I still consider Christina one of my friends. Yes, I still think she needs mental help, but she's a friend and I will stand by her, no matter what.

That is, unless she's line dancing. If she insists on engaging in such evil activities, she'll have to go with someone else. Maybe Kathie Lee Gifford, for example. I, for one, will not participate in one of the signs that the world is coming to an end.

Jimmy Boegle, a fifth-generation Nevadan, believes line dancing is a treatable disease that people can overcome. His column appears here Tuesdays, and he can be reached via e-mail at jiboegle@stanfordalumni.org. 1