After about a year of doing ballroom dancing our studio
teacher decided that our group of dancers, we'd
all started together [INAUDIBLE],,
that we were advanced enough to finally Samba,
we had been dying to do it.
And so the day came and he got up in front of the class
and started to demonstrate a few of the basic moves
of the Samba, the [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE]
and asked us, why don't you to dance.
I looked up and I thought, you know,
I've seen this dance before, not quite as refined,
but I remember that usually the male relatives, when
I was a child, after a couple of beers and a piglet,
would all get up in a, kind of, line
and do this little thing, which I guess I can do here.
[LAUGHTER]
They would get in a line and then just do this little dance,
like this.
And hold their hand up, put their hand
on their hip in the middle of the-- oh, God,
here they go again.
And it was, kind of, amazing to see the roots of that dance
as it came through generations of a family.
And then at the same time to end up
in the ballroom dance studio.
So this is for those uncles.
"Samba Summer."
Fort Valley, Georgia, 1966.
That's when I first saw it.
Broke, lake cake walk of the drunken
uncles entertaining the ladies of the family picnic.
One arm akimbo and a humpback strut.
The other stretched high in witness, yes, Lord, yes.
Palm out spread against the late summer sky.
That spirit's too yellow and far too tight
for any Christian child.
I'd walk a mile if the gal was right,
but those hips could kill the fella.
One straight leg, too, that the crooked one
dragged through a grassy rut edging the petunias.
The women roll their eyes, pluck the children
away from the charred hibachi and set out the coconut cream
pies.
You may as well go on and shoot me, tie my heart in a knot, wait,
judging from this limp here, my legs already shot.
High butt shenanigans, uncles did it best.
Pot-gutted, hitching their trousers up.
A holy grunting executed to the bleat and hiss
of Mitzi's seafoam green transistor,
common signature of the tribe.
We're only joking, we know we're just
the world's custodians, full time lovers on half pay.
Come on girl, let's dance.
Before this song is over, show me what I've been working for.