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I don’t want to sound like an old fart here. Don’t get me wrong: I am an old fart. But my intention, in this essay, is not to criticize young people, or suggest that they’re somehow inferior to my generation, the baby boomers. I’m simply noting that our generations are different.
For example, when I visit someone’s home, I ring the doorbell. To me, this seems like a good way to indicate that I’m at the front door. In fact, I believe — call me crazy — this is exactly why front doors have bells.
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Whereas to my 25-year-old daughter and her Gen Z friends, ringing the doorbell is a shockingly aggressive act, comparable to throwing a rock through the front window, or — even worse — using your telephone to call the person you’re visiting. For Gen Z, the last thing you would ever use a telephone for is to make a telephone call.
What Gen Zers do, when they arrive at their friends’ houses, is send a text that says, quote: “here.” Perhaps you’re thinking, “But what if their friends don’t happen to be looking at their phones at that moment?” Don’t be silly. Of course they’re looking at their phones. They’re always looking at their phones. Even when they’re asleep, they know — don’t ask me how — exactly what’s going on with their phones.
And that’s fine! As I say, I’m not trying to be critical; I’m just pointing out that the generations are different. And I’ve noted one difference between my generation and Gen Zers that makes me feel sad for them, because I think they’re missing out on one of the great joys in life: dancing.
Gen Z doesn’t dance. This isn’t just my opinion. This is a scientific fact based on a rigorous study I have conducted between visits to the bar at a wide variety of wedding receptions. Here’s what I’ve observed: Once the traditional first dance has been dispensed with, the band or DJ starts playing music intended to lure people onto the dance floor, usually an up-tempo rocker. For a few moments the floor is empty. Then one brave pioneer couple will make their way out there. It’s almost always an older couple. In fact, often it consists of me and my wife. Soon we’re joined on the floor by other older couples. Before long the dance floor is full, and almost everyone on it is either receiving, or will soon be receiving, Social Security benefits.
Meanwhile at the young-person tables, Gen Zers will occasionally glance up from their phones and look at us dancers with an expression of wonderment. But it’s not an admiring wonderment. It’s more like, “I wonder what in the world those old people think they’re doing.”
I’ll tell you what we think we’re doing: the twist. Or maybe the mashed potato. Or the slop, the Watusi, the frug, the pony, the swim, the hully gully, even possibly the jitterbug. Or, most likely, we’re doing some random, mutant, freeform mixture of all these and other dances from the distant past. Call it the Boomer Gyration.
We’re not all graceful; we don’t always look pretty out there. Some of us look ridiculous. But we don’t care what we look like: We’re having fun. We’re having way more fun than the phone brigade.
We like to dance because we always danced, as did the generations before us. We grew up going to school dances, sometimes even actual sock hops. Every party we went to was a dance party, usually in somebody’s basement or rec room, the music supplied by a low-fi record player, its fat spindle stacked with scratched-up 45-rpm records plopping down one on top of the other.
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Dancing was the social activity for us. It was the main way girls and boys interacted. You either danced or you stood on the sideline wishing you were dancing. Every guy my age can remember the mixture of hope and terror you felt when you finally worked up the courage to leave the sideline and cross the gym floor — a distance that felt like several miles — and walk up to a group of giggling girls, and ask one of them to dance, knowing that if she said no, you would have no option but to immediately leave the gym and hurl yourself in front of a moving bus.
But if the girl said yes — she usually said yes, thank God — the two of you would move out onto the floor. And even if you were doing some truly ridiculous dance — even if you were doing the monkey — there was still something romantic about it, because it was just you and her. And then maybe, if you were lucky, a slow-dance record would plop down on the spindle, and the two of you would move closer and embrace, maybe a little awkwardly, but still…
Was there anything better than that?
No, there was not. Which is why my generation still loves to dance.
Somehow we failed to pass this love along to succeeding generations. I asked my daughter about this, and she confirmed that Gen Zers don’t really dance, at least not as couples. Sometimes, when they hear a song they like, they’ll all jump up and down as a big, bouncy, group-dancing mass. Which is fun, I’m sure, but it’s not the same as dancing as a couple, which can be fun and intimate and goofy and romantic all at the same time.
So here’s my message to Gen Z: Next time you’re at a wedding reception, pick a partner and join us gyrating boomers on the dance floor. Don’t worry about your dancing prowess: You can’t possibly look any sillier than we do. And you just might discover that it’s actually fun. It may be so much fun that you’ll want to make a video of yourself, for TikTok.
Don’t, OK? Just dance.
AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.
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