It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got that Swing
by Steve Bernstein, 2004

I found myself looking around the world, a new world more often bleak than joyful. I was lost but on the way up and out again, I knew it, I could taste it. Amy died February 4th 2000. Her valiant battle with ovarian cancer finally took her after 4 years of trying everything from macrobiotics which truly transformed her to vibrancy to a National Institute of Health experimental procedure which eventually killed her. Ironically, she was accepted as the only candidate to try this stem cell procedure because she was the healthiest woman living in America with ovarian cancer. My 18 year marriage had dissolved by this time as I could no longer cope with my wife’s clinical depression as it drained all of me to the point where I had nothing for me, the me that wanted to be present for and with my sister Amy.

The ad said “dancing makes you happy”. I wanted some of that. Back in 1977 I had split up with my first wife and found myself back in the city, the city I ran away from 2 years earlier when wife #1 and I packed up a U-Haul and landed in Manchester NH where we ran out of gas. Amy was living on the upper west side near Broadway and invited me to hang out with her until I got my sh-t together. I finally landed a superintendent job on 75th street and West End and had a basement studio. I saw the ad on the cork board at the laundry down the street one day and started thinking, hey maybe me and Amy can learn some disco like in Saturday Night Fever. I knew that would enhance my already outstanding ability to get girls. After all, everyone said I remind them of John Travolta. So we signed up for classes. Not only did we learn, we won dance competitions and got to be closer than ever. Dance became our conduit to joy. God knows we were deprived of that growing up in the South Bronx under siege in the streets and in the house because of our raging alcoholic father. We were due.

I never danced again until after Amy died, 23 years later. I saw the ad that said “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, be happy learn how to swing dance.” There was a swing dance at a place near my mom’s. I had been spending a lot of time with my mother after Amy died. Amy wouldn’t let my mother, brother or father see her in the last year and a half of her life. She said it was too stressful. So I went to the dance. Must be over 3 years ago now. I watched all levels of dancers. It took maybe 4 or five dances before I got the nerve up to ask someone to dance. I liked the music, the movements the energy the joy it gave me. I had been watching for over two months. I bought all the old 40’s swing stuff and 50’s and 60’s rock n roll and I swung at home. I swung in front of mirrors; I swung to the beat of just about any musical genre I heard. Triple-step triple-step back-step went on in my head all day and all night. I was living it. It dawned on me when I was leading this woman all over the dance floor with some really intricate smooth turns and spins, that I was back with Amy. I’ve reconnected. Not only did I teach myself how to swing, I found my sister again and the joy, the pure joy of my body moving to the beat.