SATURDAY NITE MAYHEM MODERN ballroom dancing is a direct descendant of the dance rituals of the ancients. Many experts believe that the dance has really descended and is now at its depths. To avoid argument with the experts let us say at least that the ancients would probably never recognise their offspring and, if they did realise that they were responsible for modern ballroom dancing, they would know that they are better off as they are dead. According to the big brown encyclopedia in the reference library, dancing includes three general groups social, warlike, and religious. Some of our modern social dancing, however, has been derived from the religious and warlike dances of ancient and modern savages. Our modern jitterbugging came from the spiritual dancing of a popular American negro religion atheism, I believe. Jitterbugging is the most dangerous form of dancing that ever invaded a dance floor. It is dangerous not only to the jitterbuggers themselves, but also to the unprotected, innocent bystander. A jitterbug in full action is remindful of a commando with the hot foot. The arms and legs fly back and forth like pistons with the hips receiving the vibration the eyes roll back into the head in languid, passionate expressions hair, ties, and skirts twirl at all altitudes. There is a case on record in Jersey City in which a young female jitterbug jerked her partner's arms from their moorings, allowing the poor fellow's body to sail into a group of onlookers, crash through the dance hall wall, and splash to the street below. He died. At a popular dance hall on the south side of Chicago the management each night at closing time posts a list of casualties. One Saturday night during the rush hours the proprietor himself was fatally injured when a sweater girl crashed through his 12 ROBERT PETERSON office and on to the building adjoining, taking the owner along, desk and all. Somewhat less violent is the ballroom necker. For a long time I supposed that the embraces and kisses in which the dancers mutually indulge denoted affection for each other. I find now, however, that it is simply a form of dancing and represents no inward emotion or even interest of the participants. One of the most popular forms of dance floor mugging was a position in which the male places his puckered lips gently upon the forehead of his partner. This position soon lost its popularity after a nasty incident in a small dance hall in Albuquerque. A young couple were dancing a second chorus of "The Big Apple" the boy with his lips in the conventional position on the girl's forehead. He, being a lover of apples, began watering at the mouth and accidentally drooled on the girl's forehead, dissolving her left eyebrow. This unhappy accident set ballroom necking back twenty years. Prevalent through American dance halls is the Cuban or South American rhumba expert who learned his dancing from Jose O'Brien's 10th Avenue School of the Dance. But the rhumba, too, lost much of its popularity when all Latin-American dances were banned in the eastern states because of the epidemic of dislocated hips which struck the eastern dance lovers when the Conga swept the country. The management of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York was forced to have an emergency hospital built into their ballroom during the second week of Xavier Cugat's engagement there. One evening a customer eating at a table near the bandstand accidentally ate the head from one of the nearby drums, thinking it was his steak, of course. It happened during the confusion of a Conga. Now, every time the gentleman becomes hungry, his. stomach gurgles with a Conga beat. They should draft all musicians. 13