The principal of Border Star, the Kansas City grade school I attended, delivered a pronouncement in advance of our seventh grade Christmas Tea Dance: “The only proper occasion for physical contact between the sexes before marriage is ballroom dancing.” His pronouncement reduced us boys to paroxysms of embarrassed laughter, though we didn’t really comprehend the innuendo. This was in the 1950s, before the invention of sex, which according to one authority took place in 1963, “between the end of the ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ ban and the Beatles’ first LP.”

Prior to the dance we assembled in the school gym; boys lined up at one end, girls on the other. At the sound of a whistle, we boys stampeded across the floor to fill out our dance cards. Forming a wedge, we bore down on the two or three cutest girls in our class. It was a cruel kind of culling. Some girls were left with empty cards. They stood forsaken like literal wallflowers as if ready to be shot. I remember little about the dance itself except that, as far as physical contact was concerned, boys and girls held themselves at arm’s length with sweaty palms and agonizing silences. The Xmas dance was not a great deal of fun.

After seventh grade, we were condemned to attend dancing school in a musty old apartment building on the Country Club Plaza. The teacher was a vivacious woman who tried to infuse us with enthusiasm for the foxtrot, the boxstep, the waltz and other chaste Victorian dances.

Then something happened. Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” struck, unleashing chaos. Suddenly, ballroom dancing looked hopelessly old-fashioned and effete. The old dance steps were rudely cast aside and with them quaint rites of courtship. No more bows and curtseys, no more corsages and billets-doux. The new dancing featured writhing, shaking, stomping and other frenzied variations mating rituals.

No more crooning about love and marriage. No more innocence or decorum. The new songs were blunt: “If you think I’m sexy and you want my body…”

Not long ago, Lawrence’s Free State High School felt compelled to institute a “no provocative dancing” policy, due to an outbreak of raunchy grinding, gyrating and dirty dancing at school dances. A video showed the school mascot performing the forbidden moves accompanied by rapper Nellie’s “Shake Your Tail Feathers.” I suspect it too provoked hilarity among the students and was seized as a primer in naughtiness, exciting the youthful instinct to do whatever is forbidden.

I have seen a dizzying succession of dances in my life, from the boxstep, the bunny hop, the hokey pokey and the turkey trot to the jerk, the twist, the frug, the dirty bop.

I myself have performed the Willy Waw, the Egg Beater, and the Cork Popper. What force drives us to abandon the old style and to embrace whatever is new? How many have found true love or painful rejection leading or following some unknowable partner to the music of a moment?

My own dancing days are over. And looking back, I find that I was never that great a dancer. Still, I seem to remember once or twice having lost myself on a dark dance floor.

— George Gurley, a resident of rural Baldwin City, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.