OLD LAMPS FOR NEW

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 66284, 30 September 1925, Page 4

OLD LAMPS FOR NEW

(By Junius Junior.) I am reaching swiftly the allotted three score years and ten, and the | snows of age are whitening my hair.' My step has lost its elasticity and I am no longer as limber as of yore. But my eyes are tolerably keen and my heart as young as ever it was. And so it is that I still like to stagger along to the dance as of yore and watch the young folk trip the light fantastic, with the abandoned ardour of youth. Sometimes, too, as I look upon the gyrating throng and view the happy, flushed faces as they flashy past me in the whilrwind of the onestep, or gaze open mouthed at "the acrobatic feats of the modern “Blues,” I sigh for my vanished youth and yearn with a great yearning for the vigour of my younger days; then a man had to be in strict training if he wished to hold his own on the dance floor. Half an hour’s vigorous polka with some sweet maid of seventeen stone called for powers of endurance that would supply a modern iazzer for a whole evening. The one-step may be a great dance when judged by modern dances, but it simply can’t hold a candle to the old Highland schottische or the mazurka. Sometimes they do play one of the old dances, and then one sees some real dancing. All the old folk get going, and it is a sight worth seeing—I forget my gout and whirl away with old Mrs Smith in the maze of the Prince of Wales or the barn dance. Old Bill on the fiddle warms un to his work and it resolves itself into a contest between the musician and the dancers, just as it used to be in the old days. £ By and by the young folk catch the infection and join in, aye and enjoy it, too, every bit as much as we old folk, judging by the way they encore again and again. But old crocks are not so well able to join into their dances as they do ours, for the jazz and its mysteries are not for such as we, and black looks and blacker bruises are the lot of the old ’un who dares to try a round dance when everyone else is jazzing, though 'tis little they think of getting in every ones road by jazzing through a waltz or schottische. , But yet it seems to me that the old time dance is not entirely doomed, but rather that the present craze |or the jazz will pass away and the old time dance will come again into its own and hold again an undisputed sway.