Randy Fitzgerald

This column originally appeared in City Edition. Pick up Randy’s annual Valentine’s Day column in two weeks from one of City Edition’s 200 locations around town.

I won’t dance, don’t ask me. But Barb now …

I bet you thought you already knew the difference between men and women, but you probably really don’t. I do believe, however, you will agree with me when I point out the true difference:  women dance. 

Women dance alone, they dance together, they dance with almost any guy in the room.  They dance when they’re young, they dance when they’re old. They dance in public, they dance at home. They dance while they do housework, they dance while they exercise. Fast or slow, barefoot or shoed, indoors or out, women dance.

Men don’t dance.

Or at least we don’t after we’re past fraternity party age. Or unless it’s to make a woman happy. Years ago I even took a ballroom dancing lesson (one) to please my bride, but it was she who, at the end of the evening, decided one of us was hopeless and we shouldn’t come back. 

I bet there’s not a guy out there who admires dancing more than I do, but I don’t dance.  I never miss a “Dancing with the Stars” when its season comes around. I was tremendously disappointed when the traveling show sold out before Barb and I could get tickets. You might well ask how I can appreciate dancing so much without ever dancing.

The answer is, I think, that I grew up on Hollywood musicals: “Show Boat,”  “The Barkleys of Broadway,” “West Side Story,” “Guys and Dolls.” My favorite movie star in my youth was a dancer named Vera-Ellen (see “White Christmas” and “On the Town”), and I was also always a huge fan of Fred and Ginger, Gene and Cyd, Marge and Gower.

            But I don’t dance. It’s certainly not because I think dancing is a sissy pursuit for men. Years ago I saw Edward Villela dance, and I had no trouble believing the advance publicity that he was the greatest athlete around at that point.  Nor is the reason I don’t dance that I can’t dance (though I can’t)—but even if I were good at it, I know I would still be very reluctant to get up and do it.

            I was thinking about this whole dancing thing because of something that happened at the neighborhood health club last week. The club has gotten very popular in recent days, with the result that it’s practically impossible to find an exercise machine of any kind if you try to get in right after work.  For a while Barb and I were lucky enough to lay claim to the last bike or the last treadmill, but one evening last week we arrived to find every machine taken.

            Barb immediately went to a corner and started to fast dance, all by herself, totally unselfconscious despite the fact that, thanks to the mirrors that are everywhere around, she was completely visible to the 40 or 50 people who did have a machine and nothing interesting to watch as they pedaled or strode except for a 65-year-old lady in the corner dancing her heart out to “Sweet Little Sixteen.”

            The health club generally has really good music to exercise to, mostly from the early “American Bandstand” era—lots of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Elvis and the Stones—music you could really dance, too—but of course, I don’t dance. I felt a little bad about leaving Barb out there to fend for herself—she continued to dance all alone without stopping until a treadmill came available a half an hour later. “I didn’t come all the way up here to sit still for half an hour,” she told me afterwards. 

I felt bad for having abandoned her, having made a quick break for the weights—but not so bad that I would ever have gotten up to dance in front of 40 or 50 people who weren’t dancing.  I bet most men feel that way, and I bet a lot of other women would be as comfortable with it as Barb was.

            How can it be that usually retiring, even shy, self-effacing, modest women who would never dream of fighting in the street over a parking place are so casual about getting up in front of hordes of people to dance, even sometimes when a spotlight is on them?

            We were at a Navy reunion in Charleston last year and ended up at a party where an Elvis impersonator was performing. He was on a little stage, and I would say there was probably half a fleet in the audience.  Elvis-Lite asked at one point whether there were any sisters in the audience, and Barb raised her hand.  So over he comes, holds out his arm to Barb, and up she goes onto the stage, to fast dance while he held her hand and sang “Little Sister.”

            I was thinking that I would rather have gone three with Ali than danced in that spotlight, but Barb was not only dancing; she was happily chirping the lyrics along with “Elvis.”  I did notice she looked pretty cute up there.

I also noticed that Elvis didn’t dance.

You’d think a man who married his wife in 1961 would by now be familiar with the complete list of rules, but after all these years, I’m still stumbling into blunders and discovering huge gaps in my domestic intelligence.

            I blame it, of course, on the male jerk gene.  I’ve written about this gene many times over the years-the slightly askew genetic mutation that leads men to get into fistfights over parking spaces, fail to notice a wife’s new hairdo, prefer the early “humiliation stages” of American Idol, rest their eyes during chic flics, drop towels on the floor and worship the Three Stooges.

            My own jerk gene is overactive. But somebody should have advised me sooner of an apparently cardinal household rule of which I was clearly unaware. That is, don’t take visitors to the house upstairs without checking with your wife first-or, better yet, just don’t ever take visitors to the house upstairs at all.

Have the rest of you gentleman been aware of this rule?  How did I possibly get into my sixties without hearing it before?  But believe me, I know it now.

My unforgettable lesson came several months ago-but first a little background.

Barb had been sick for about a week, confined to bed, unable to do a thing, while I took very good care of her, preparing and serving meals, seeing to her medicines and juices, and otherwise being a good husband. But meanwhile, her work assignments piled up around her and the housework, which I do not have a talent for, thanks to the jerk gene, went to perdition in a purse.

Even I, who wouldn’t notice a messy house until a day or two before the condemnation papers were nailed to the door, was aware that during Barb’s confinement the house had slowly fallen apart-in particular, my upstairs den, to which I retire at the end of my workday to hang my jacket from the doorknob, remove my socks, spread about my books and newspapers, deposit my cup and saucer, rub a basket of fur off the cat, munch my popcorn or shell peanuts into the chair, file papers on the floor, spill a bottle of aspirin and otherwise collect confusion, which can accumulate impressively, as you might imagine, over the course of a week or so.

            Finally there came a night when Barb was forced to drag herself out of bed and to the computer in our study to tackle an important assignment of a scope the size of a master’s thesis, due the next morning. She wasn’t dressed, hadn’t washed her hair for a week, was still coughing and hacking every other minute, but nevertheless wasn’t worried when the doorbell rang, especially when she heard me greet my old friend Brice, who hadn’t been to our house in years.

She was alarmed, however, when she heard me say to him, “Come on upstairs.”

In fact, before I got the phrase completely out of my mouth, I heard her feet hit the floor and she was out into the hall, yelling down to me, “No, no, Randy, have you lost your mind? Brice can’t come up here.”

 Of course, that wasn’t the warmest of welcomes for poor Brice, who had kindly come over to deliver a DVD he had made for me as a gift. I had been headed upstairs with him to hear it.

At Barb’s “words of greeting,” Brice took a couple of steps back, while I was foolish enough to take a few more steps in her direction. After she explained to Brice exactly what the problem was (me), she asked us to give her 10 minutes to clean up the den and then we could come up.  We did, she did and we did-and it looked pretty good for a 10-minute makeover.

After Brice left, I learned the rule that I had been unaware of for decades: nobody gets to come upstairs.  Guests can have their run of the entire downstairs of the house, but they better not venture past the first balustrade.

“Remember on the Christmas house tours how they put the big poinsettia on the bottom step so nobody tries to head upstairs?” Barb reminded me. “People don’t get to go upstairs even in the best of homes.”

A few weeks ago, Barb showed me a very nice Christmas card she had written Brice and his wife, apologizing for her bad manners when he visited. “I may have confused him,” Barb said, “but his wife will understand.”

I’m not sure that they have an upstairs, though.

I have an image in my mind of an evening in the early 1960s when Barb’s mother came to visit us in our little newlywed apartment at Crestview. As she and Barb sat and talked, Barb was busy turning the collar on one of the dress shirts I wore in those days to my job at the local paper, and my wife’s mother said to her, “One of these days you two are going to have a lot of money if you continue being as frugal as that.”

            For those of you who are not old enough or poor enough to remember when people (read “wives”) still turned shirt collars, here’s the explanation: you reversed a shirt collar when the inside of the collar that faces the neck became frayed with use and age, and then the collar was carefully removed from the stitching that connected it to the shirt, reversed and resewn, to live on for another year or two until that side wore out, too.

            While my late mother-in-law’s prediction never even came close to being true, she was right in observing that her daughter was frugal.  In fact, I got a bit alarmed when Barb began to take an undue interest in a recent news story about a group of folks who resolved not to buy anything for a year, except food and other essentials. They saw no movies, never ate out, bought no clothes, took no trips.  Barb could do that; I could not.

            You realize, though, there is a difference between being frugal and being tight. My wife always enjoys buying things for family and friends; she just doesn’t like to spend money on herself. And she hates to spend more than she has to for anything. She was the one who told the car dealer that he’d have to give us extra money off the car if he expected to slap his dealership name on the trunk-and he did.  And while she no longer turns shirt collars, she does buy most of my shirts at Goodwill-including recently a great handmade one with a Nathan’s label, perfect except that it had the name “Harvey” embroidered on the cuff.  “Tell ‘em that’s your middle name,” she advised me.

            This Christmas for the first time we, along with my brother and sister and their spouses, decided to cut back on individual gifts. Instead, we drew names and allocated $100 to buy a big gift for just that one family member. Then we dropped a few hints as to what we might like to have.  I wanted a digital camera; my sister wanted a fantastic birdhouse; my sister-in-law, an oil painting; my brother-in-law, blacksmithing tools; Barb wanted a store-bought massage or two, and my brother Terry-whose name Barb drew-didn’t help us out with a suggestion.

            Barb bought him a metal detector.  She and Terry have frugality in common, and she thought he would enjoy all the coins and jewelry he could find on the beach next year. Little did she know that she soon would hope to benefit from the metal detector herself.

            At the end of November, Barb had a terrible fall on a sidewalk near the house, biting all the way through her lip, among other injuries, and having to go to the emergency room where she got six stitches.  She healed nicely and is doing quite well now, thank you, except that her lip feels strange, she says.  I expect that she bit through a nerve, but she thinks she has a little piece of wire left in there from one of her stitches.

            She thinks this because, frugal as she is, she removed her stitches herself.  To my horror, she went out and bought new nail clippers and clipped the ends of all those little wires and proceeded to remove them, rather than go to our very reasonable doctor who would have known considerably more about what he was doing.

            When the lip didn’t seem to heal fast enough or well enough, I suggested she go to the doctor now, after the fact, and see if she’d overlooked a stitch. But she had another idea-again, a freebie. “Do you think Terry’s metal detector could detect whether I still have a piece of that wire in my lip?” she asked.

            Good lord.  Brother Terry was very amused at the thought and agreed that he would be more than happy to scan her lip, but he thought the experiment might not work if she had any fillings, which she does, “or possibly rocks in her head.”

            So she has an appointment now with the doctor, which will probably involve an x-ray and more expense than she would have had had she just gone to him in the first place to get the stitches out.

            Meanwhile, Terry gleefully reports that he has already found $2.25 in his front yard.