Draw The Line

Hah! I swiped this title from an Aerosmith album/song. Tonight, September 28th 2012 I experienced soemthing I'd never witnessed in person before....Line Dancing. Yeah, that's right. I've heard that Country/Western music is bigger in New York than anywhere else in our great nation. I've seen Line Dancing in movies and television shows, but this was my first real-life foray into such a pastime. The venue I witnessed this was at Hooters, of all places. The Hooters that I used to hang out in is too small to have live bands, let alone a bunch of white trash yokels lined up like dominoes trying to stay in synch with music. For this experience I had to travel to Farmingdale New York, in Suffolk County. The Hooters there was built specifically to be a Hooters, unlike my Hooters, which used to be a Sizzler Steak House and who-knows-what prior to that.  I'm a Rock 'N' Roller, so I'm not well versed in Country Western tunes, but I can tell good musicians, and the band carried their weight. The crowd was compiled of young & old, families, couples and people who looked as if hey just had nothing better to do.  I met some friends there, and had they not told me about it, I would have been gone in a flash, but I hung around to talk music with one of my few buddies. The people doing the dancing looked like they were forced laborers, told to do some menial, unrewarding task, most looked as if it was just routine, not something they actually enjoyed. For a couple of hours I watched a large grup of people doing essentially the same set of steps for dozens of diffeent songs. Fast, slow, upbeat and laid-back, and they kept on slogging along like a derelict locomotive with it's last lumps of coal about to be consumed and the water in the boiler no longer enough to propel it forward. During the last set, a more up-tempo tune, one of the Hooter Girls ran out onto the floor and began boggieing as if she had eaten a pound of methamphetamine. She was dancing like she loved every minute of that song. She waved her arms, whirled her hair, shimmied and shook like she was in an earthquake that registered off the Richter Scale. She was hypnotic! After the song ended, she went back to her duties waitressing and the automatons relined up and began their drone all over again. Natursally some were more adept at it than others, some looked as if the consumption of alcohol was impeding their dancing prowess, and some looked like zombies, who had no conrol over their bodies, they were mere marionettes, and somebody else was pulling the strings. Rock and roll dancers tend to be less sttructured in their steps, it's like their central nervous system takes over and the music is felt, not just heard. If you've ever watched  rock musicians play, they make all kinds of faces, and most are not conscious of it because they're so wrapped up in playing, everything else is secondary.  These people looked as if somebody had put a gun to their heads and said, " Dance, or I'll kill ya!". I knew only four of the songs played, and if nI ha dto dance to them, there is no way I'd be able to do it using the same preogression of steps over and over and over and over and over. They need to learn where to draw the line.