This sweltering summer, we’re sweating it out with “Summer of the Twist” by Kaija Pepper from our upcoming Room 47.3 Bodies, now available for pre-order!
One hot August afternoon in 1964, heading to the park for a game of tetherball, we got to talking about the twist, which was everywhere during my adolescence.
Maybe we’d watched Chubby Checker on TV the night before in an Ed Sullivan Show rerun, the episode where the solidly built rock n’ roller sings a medley of The Twist and Let’s Twist Again, churning back and forth with hips made of butter, a flock of backup dancers twisting with jazzier, jivier embellishments. The Beatles might have belted out Twist and Shout on the radio that morning, sung a few months earlier on Ed Sullivan to an audience of screaming teenage girls, my first sight of the long-haired Liverpudlians. Maybe Beach Party was playing at a cinema nearby, charming us with its mobs of young people twisting alongside Annette Funicello. In one scene, Annette dances barefoot in the sand, wearing a two-piece bathing suit with impressive nonchalance, her hips radiating pure joy. Of course, a cute boy (Frankie Avalon) is nearby, but partners in the twist aren’t stuck together like in the old-fashioned waltz we’d learned at school. With twisters, you can’t always tell who is partnering who: couples drift away from each other, still together but doing their own thing. A dancer might even be solo, surrounded and supported by the group. The twist was my kind of friendly free-form dance. “It’s like you’re putting out a cigarette!” I yelled the instruction—heard someplace or other—as if I knew all about twisting and smoking. Exaggerating the way smokers stamp out cigarette butts they casually drop on the street, I ground the toes of my runners into the gravel roadside. The gang joined in, rocking forward and back, arms and hips pumping side to side. Instead of a skinny ten-year-old, I felt big and bold, ready to put on a skimpy bathing suit and shake my shoulders with those Beach Party girls. Twisting and shouting, we answered the call to “shake it, shake it, shake it, baby, now.” At the park, stuck waiting our turn for tetherball, we wandered over to the swings and tried yet again to swing close enough, high enough, to reach the chestnut tree with the tips of our toes. Then we goofed around on the teeter-totters, which we felt too big for but couldn’t resist. The afternoon stretched out before us, full of time just waiting to be filled, our bodies slowly ripening under the sun.
Find more glittering pieces about chronic pain, disability, mental illness, through-lines of community, radical care, and self-affirmation in Room 47.3 Bodies.
