The Skate!

Sometimes I feel sorry for my dear wife – putting up with my sense of humor can't be easy, especially when dumb luck conspires to set up a perfect situation. Just yesterday evening, during dance practice, she showed me a new WCS move she's working on called 'the skater turn'. It, as you probably can guess, looks like you're skating, complete with hands folded behind the back. Since I don't skate all this was okay but she could have been showing me the 'falling from an airplane without a parachute' because I would have had just as much basis for comparison. Anyway, during my usual web trawling for old ads and sheet music covers I happened to come upon this little gem.

Apparently, back in the forsaken part of the 60's when Madison Avenue was desperately trying to pet the Mod market, Career Club (manufacturer of Nerd-ware) decided they wanted to get hip to the frug. Of course, since this ad comes from 1967, they'd pretty much missed the entire psychedelic/mod thing and were stumbling blindly into the Disco Era. Ah, the days before Madison Avenue defined youth culture…weren't they grand?

To be honest the steps of this 'dance' read like a vision summoned from some dank church basement after passing around the wafer box one too many times. Note that boy and girl never touch. To me this smacks of the covert moral cops of the 1950's trying to control the misguided youth they begot. Funny that a generation which grew up on songs like Cab Calloway's Reefer Man and danced jive and bop would be so intent on the whole 'no touchie' thing.

As for the fashion – the blog from which I filched this ad made the point that all fashion is relative and I agree to an extent. It's impossible and unwise to attempt to judge what was stylish back in '67 with the sensibilities of the new millennium. I will say this guy's belt makes it look like his plaid undershirt has come un-tucked and it looks like dorkopotamus stole his hair from one of the members of Devo. I also find it interesting that the pose our hip young couple is styling in the ad doesn't match any of the described steps of the dance. I guess you can't capture true dweebdom on film – it's like a UFO or vampire or something.

Oh, and I should mention, Kelly's skater manuver looks nothing like the WASPercising shown in the ad. It's just unlucky enough to share the name!