Never Sit if You Can Dance

Young couple swing dancing in the 1940s

Neither of my parents pursued any activity that today would qualify as “exercise.” Theirs was many generations before Jane Fonda’s “feel the burn!” workout videos, before isometrics and aerobics, before latex and Under Armour, before they even knew that regular exercise was good for them. My parents didn’t even know how to swim, except in a pinch Dad could dog-paddle.

But, boy, could they dance.

Babe and Jim Giese in their courting days.

One of my favorite black and white photos from a family scrapbook was of my parents dressed up to attend a dance at the Washington Athletic Club in their courtship days. Mom, twenty-seven, was wearing a black floor-length gown that was clingy enough to show some curves, and her auburn hair was done in deep finger waves, a flirty hairstyle that was popular back then. Dad was wearing a black tuxedo. Imagine that. Dad, who ended up favoring one-piece polyester baby blue jumpsuits from Penney’s, at thirty, and courting Babe, was dressed-to-kill in a gorgeous black tuxedo. That photo captured a man and a woman who were clearly a hot couple. They looked so fresh and young, so glamorous and romantic, so pre-children. Since Babe had also told me that Dad sometimes took a room at the Washington Athletic Club, over the years I pestered her to tell me if she stayed there with him before they married. “You can tell me, Mom. It’ll just be between us.” She never said. What she did say, which was so unsatisfying, was “I think that’s private.”

Every Saturday my Mom and Dad, before they were my Mom and Dad, went to a dancehall, often the Trianon Ballroom in downtown Seattle. Babe said it was beautiful with polished hardwood floors, and it was so packed that you could hardly get in.

“We never went anywhere that didn’t have an orchestra. It was first-class all the way. You would’ve liked that place,” she said to me.

When I googled the Trianon, which is located in what is now a hipster area north of Seattle called Belltown, I learned that the dance floor had accommodated five thousand dancers. Babe said that everyone in their crowd were dancers, smooth dancers, and they danced to beautiful music, not the “junk” people listen to today.

If, as the saying goes, dancing is sex standing up, then my parents and their friends must have had a really good time gliding around those beautiful ballrooms.

Her crowd did the fox trot, swing, two-step, but nothing jumpy like the jitterbug or boogie-woogie. Babe said that sometimes the dancehall would have a Charleston Contest. “But we weren’t Charleston people,” she said.

The arrival of my brother, Jimmy, and me coincided with the passing of the big band era and the closing of the dance halls, but our parents kept dancing at home. Babe and Dad were a popular couple, and by then they had the largest house in their group, not large by current standards, but large enough by post-war 1950s middle-class standards, so the parties were always at our place. Dad had turned a daylight basement into a rec room with a highly-waxed green linoleum dance floor. That danceable space was where my brother and I skidded around in our stockinged feet, and where I cradled my new baby sister, Wendy, as I danced her to sleep. That’s also where the adults — young couples with young children, hard-working and hard-partying — danced and drank and smoked cigarettes and partied into the wee hours. That was my instructional template for being a grown up: gather a bunch of friends, some aunts and uncles, co-workers, and neighbors, roll up the rugs, and drink and dance.

Jim and Babe Giese in their later dancing days

“Your Dad and I definitely never sat and just drank alcohol,” said Babe.

“Well, so what did you do if you didn’t just sit and drink?” I asked, reverting to my best professional interview style.

“We danced!” she said, as if I were an idiot for even asking “Never sit if you can dance.”

When Herb Alpert and his trumpet blasted onto the scene with the Tijuana Brass and The Lonely Bull, Babe wore a bias-cut flared taffeta skirt, which she’d sewn herself, that swayed when she danced. By then Dad had installed a handy beer keg in the kitchen, and the adults stayed up even later.

Babe and Dad’s party drugs of choice — d & d — were drinking and dancing. Dave Barry, in writing recently about his parents drinking and partying, said “My parents and their friends probably would have lived longer if their lifestyle choices had been healthier.” Babe lived a very long and full life — until she was almost 98 — and she and her friends worked hard, partied hard, and had a lot of fun. What’s healthier than that, Dave?

I pretty much caught Babe’s sassy sense of rhythm and enthusiasm for dancing: In elementary school I raced home to dance with Dick Clark’sAmerican Bandstand on our black and white TV.

By my freshmen year at the University of Texas at the legendary Texas-OU weekend, one of the biggest rivalries in college football, I was having crazy-fun at a fraternity party. There I was, the first in my family to attend college, and I was down on all fours on a beer-soaked dance floor, “gatoring” to the Grateful Dead’s Gloria! I’m not sure that’s what Babe had in mind when she advised, Never sit if you can dance.

Being Babe’s daughter, I guess it should be no surprise that in stressful transitions I turned to dancing. After my husband died, I signed up for swing lessons at the Dr. Dance Studio in Santa Monica. But the lessons were too decorously choreographed, too contained, too formal, too much like following doctor’s orders — foot-ball-change — and in high heels. I craved something — else!

That’s when I stumbled onto Fumbling Toward Ecstasy on Sunday morning — a time slot I was having trouble filling. Fumbling turned out to be improvisational, trance-like, group dancing. In a large warehouse that was transformed into a dance space, I entered another world — a feverish world where hundreds of people gathered to dance for the dance of it. After seventeen years of a good marriage that was now gone, I, as a new widow, clung to Fumbling to escape being isolated in my too-silent house with only one small dog (sorry Charmlee) for company. It was always high quality entertainment — a woman in a pink leotard was an awe-inspiring professional dancer, a Chinese man in an orange ankle-length pleated skirt glided by as smoothly as an ice-skater, and a belly-dancer was swathed in layers of purple edged with tinkling bells and bangles.

My nephew asked, “Is that like a Sunday morning rave? A mosh-pit for adults?” Maybe, I said.

Sometimes the music was cranked up so loud I was transported back to the craziness of frat parties at UT. But those were called Friday night keg parties, not Sunday morning trance dancing. I was so taken with Fumblingthat I even brought Babe. By then she was in her late 80s, and I got her a chair so she could watch from the sidelines, or join in if she wanted to. Afterward she said she didn’t understand why people didn’t dance with partners, or why some men danced with each other, occasionally wearing long skirts. She wasn’t judgmental, just puzzled.

Flash forward. I no longer spent my Sunday mornings dancing like a dervish, and Babe was no longer dancing. In her ninth decade, she was walker-bound, and she was not reconciled to her fate. One day we were going through the old photos, and we came across that dreamy one of her and dad before they went dancing. “I’d give anything if I could dance,” she said. “My feet aren’t suitable now.”

Although Babe had managed to avoid all major health problems, she suffered from peripheral neuropathy, a nerve disorder where she lost feeling on the soles of her feet, an ironic malady to beset someone who had loved to dance. The peripheral neuropathy destroyed her balance and created the urgent need for her to cling to her walker. Since the walker was red, we called it her Ferrari.

“People should dance more and sit less,” she said.

I told her that her gorgeous Trianon Ballroom had been converted into an office building.

“That’s kind of awkward,” she said.

I wondered if any of the office workers at the Trianon on Third Avenue in Seattle knew they were working in what had once been one of the largest dance halls west of Chicago, the kind where giant mirrored balls rotated on the ceiling and couples fell in love.

I did not tell Babe that all signs of her popular dance club were long gone, and that the historic Trianon dancehall now housed a gym.

When my husband, Ed, and I married a few years back, I asked Babe to walk me down the aisle. Dad had died years earlier, so Babe, my only living parent, was the natural choice.

“You’d better ask someone else,” she said, turning me down. “I don’t know if I can.”

“Of course you can,” I said, trusting her lifetime of resiliency and spunk.

The “aisle” was a dirt path on a rugged mountaintop at a nature preserve located in the Santa Monica Mountains. The afternoon of the wedding, some of Ed’s six grandchildren flew kites from the windy mountaintop. The beautiful, ninety-two year-old, mother-of-the-bride was dressed elegantly in a hot pink Chinese coat with a mandarin collar. Her “Ferrari” was decorated with so many colorful flowers it looked like a moving bouquet.

After the flower girls scattered petals down the aisle and the ring bearers made their way to the canopy where Ed was waiting, the string quartet struck up Penny Lane. A gasp passed through the crowd as our friends realized that Babe was walking me down the aisle. Everyone stood and cheered and clapped. And Babe — Never sit if you can dance — danced at my wedding.

David Parker, family friend, dancing with Babe at Jo’s wedding.

“Go! While You Can.”

Songzanlin Monastery, Zhongdian, Yunnan province

At 95, Babe still had a valid U.S. passport.

But by then the most my mother, who was known as Babe, could manage was a domestic flight from Houston to Los Angeles to visit me, and even that was a stretch. So I dreaded dropping the news that Ed, my husband, and I were leaving for China. It didn’t seem fair that I could still up and go, and she couldn’t.

I must have expected her to object — to complain that a month was too long, China was too far. Instead she said “Go! while you can.”

Go?

Author in doorway Lijiang Old Town, China

She told me about Dr. Wendell, who had delivered her three babies and had wanted to travel. By the time he was ready to retire, his wife was in a wheelchair.

“Go!” she said, bestowing a mother’s blessing. “My travel days are getting shorter. I know that. I can’t go as far, as often.”

Babe Giese, not traveling, at home, Houston, Texas

Babe had been my accomplice on many adventures. All I needed to do was just say the word. An expedition to look at quilts in Amish country, or lunch with my friends at Windows on the World, the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center, and Babe was game. She asserted none of the scrutiny that most companions would have insisted on — when, where, how long will we be gone? Babe’s go-with-the-flow attitude was the opposite of a nervous, uptight, easily flustered traveler. The only time I remember her objecting to any arrangement I made was in Pennsylvania at a 19th century inn. She did not appreciate it when the clerk indicated that the shared toilet was way down at the far end of a public hall.

Once, after I returned from India, I couldn’t stop raving about the Pushkar Camel Fair in Rajasthan and the Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur. Fingering the saffron kurta with gold threads that I’d brought her, Babe said, wistfully, “It’s too bad we didn’t know earlier how much you’d love India” — meaning, we could have gone together.

Babe, who loved her home but wasn’t a homebody, had always practiced “Go! while you can.”

Prayer flags Zhongdian near Songzanlin Monastery

At first, travel had meant modest road trips up and down the West Coast where Dad went inside for a business meeting while she embroidered outside in the car. Later, with my brother and me tagging along, family travel meant piling in Dad’s Black Hawk Studebaker and setting off from Seattle for some simple destination like Seaside or Roseburg in Oregon. While Dad drove, Babe, the navigator, flipped through a spiral-bound triptik from AAA. The quirky red and white Burma-Shave road signs posted along the edges of the highway — Covers a multitude of chins — passed for entertainment.

Eventually, my father’s business became successful enough that he and Babe were able to take business trips to Norway, Taiwan, and Singapore. In Hong Kong they bought an ornately carved green ”jade” urn. My sister got the idea that it would be our parents’ funeral urn. She inserted a divider — a piece of stiff cardboard from the dry cleaners — and on one side she had Dad write ‘Dad,’ in his scratchy sixth-grade drop-out hand-writing, and on the other side Mom wrote ‘Mom’ in her graceful Palmer cursive.

Good Luck Totems — Yak Meadow at Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Lijiang

When I told Babe that Ed and I would be leaving for China, I mentioned that on the way home we’d stop in Singapore.

“Your Dad and I loved Singapore,” Babe said. “Your Dad wanted to retire there.”

He did? That was the first I’d heard. While Babe reminisced about Singapore, I schemed how to include her on our trip.

For many a bonus of travel is the chance to unplug, disconnect, a digital detox from office and family. But when you have a mother who was once a traveler, and who is still curious about the world, you discover that if you want to, it’s easy to stay connected.

Author and husband, Ed Warren, at Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, September 11, 2012

The first misty morning at the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, Ed and I arrived so early we were almost the only people clambering up the steep, uneven stone steps. On the drive back to Beijing, the pumpkins and cornhusks piled at roadside stands looked pretty much like the autumn farm stands back home. However, the evening street food in Beijing — raw embryos (whose I didn’t know), crickets, and grasshoppers — didn’t look like anything back home. I downloaded the photos and sent them to Amanda, Babe’s caregiver. First thing the next morning, I called Babe, who in Houston was a day behind, enjoying her first Scotch-and-soda of the evening. Amanda pulled up a chair for Babe in front of the computer screen.

“I feel like I’m on the trip with you!” Mom said. Babe the postmodern digital armchair traveler.

I felt the same way. When I spotted the pair of petrified walnuts that Mark Ma, our guide, had inherited from his grandfather, and used to massage his hands for finger-hand agility to hold off arthritis — I wondered, What will Babe think of this? 

Petrified walnuts for finger agility

When LaMu, our guide in the Tibetan area of China, told us her mother was married to two brothers who were yak herdsmen, and she didn’t know which was her father, I couldn’t wait to tell Babe about that. Even though I was on the other side of the world, it was easy to bridge the span so Babe didn’t feel lonely or left out.

On left, LaMu, guide in Zhongdian

My experience didn’t keep me from sinking in and savoring the present moment. Instead, communicating almost daily with Babe from halfway around the world added an extra dimension to the idea of personal photo journalism.

In Yangshou, a sleepy rural village outside of Guilin in southern China, we met a seventy-seven year-old woman who lived in an ancient stone house that had been in her family for three hundred and fifty years. Out on her unpaved patio, where roosters and chickens scratched in the dirt, the homeowner smiled coquettishly as she modeled a “raincoat” made out of stiff bamboo fronds. This petite old woman also demonstrated that she was still strong enough, using both hands, to crank the heavy stone wheel to grind soybeans into soymilk for tofu. Inside, in a room off the living room, a coffin — shiny black lacquer with red and gold designs — was lined up against a stone wall next to a cooking area with a hot plate, a skillet, and a rice cooker.

Our guide explained that in this village it was the tradition that when people reached seventy they acquired their own coffin.

Standing next to her coffin, the owner put her hands together in prayer and smiled for my iPhone. It seemed to make that spunky seventy-seven year-old, who appeared to be in excellent health, content to have her coffin so close.

77 year old woman, in her 350 year old home, near Yulong River, Guilin

The next morning, some 8,500 miles and a world away, Babe, in her apartment on the fourteenth floor of the senior high-rise community, tried to make sense of the photo of the tiny, gray-haired woman standing next to a coffin.

I explained that, Yes, the coffin was inside her house, out in full view, right next to the kitchen.

“Do you want me to keep a coffin in my apartment?” she asked.

“Only if you want to.”

“I could start a new trend,” she said.

I didn’t remind her that she’d already chosen to be cremated, and there was that urn waiting on the top shelf of my sister’s bookshelf. Since 1998, Dad’s ashes had filled his side.

I absorbed Babe’s “Go!” so fully that when the first woman won the Iditarod Dog Sled race in Alaska, I dropped everything and took off for Nome to do a story on Libby Riddles. When the lava started flowing on the Big Island, I spent New Years Eve nearby at the Volcano House.

Luckily, when Ed and I met, Babe’s “Go! while you can,” was a good fit for both of us. We pledged to go as far as we could — always with hiking sticks — for as long as we could: Hike in Torres de Paine in Chilean Patagonia, slog across the marshy Nature Walk in Gangtey, Bhutan, and in Dharmasala, trek in the snow-packed lower Himalayas where we happened upon a chai tea shack in the middle of nowhere. (My brother liked to joke that we hiked away from the Four Seasons and we hiked back to the Four Seasons. He had a point: We were in rough environments but we were not roughing it.)

Jo and Ed in Lijiang

As newlyweds, we were pretty much inseparable, and we had a deal: since we’d met in our 60s, we agreed that we’d go almost anywhere together as long as neither of us had been there before with previous loves.

Travel was our way of amassing a personal history fast. It allowed us to say, Remember when we were in Tanzania, Lijiang, Marrakesh. It rescued us from constantly referring to the interesting lives we’d led, and the places we’d traveled before we met.

I continued to travel — usually to places Babe had not been, and I always sent photos.

Excerpt "Lessons from Babe," a quirky mother-daughter memoir.

Good Luck Totem — Yak Meadow at Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Lijiang