It’s a new year. If the past is a guide, the goal of getting into shape tops resolutions, including mine. Yet suddenly, going to a gym seems so yesterday. The latest generation of exercise equipment taps into social networking to allow us to exercise with one another from the comfort of our homes.
There’s Peloton, the maker of high-end stationary bikes and cringeworthy commercials, which lets you join a spin class from your study. There’s a smart mirror that brings live fitness classes to your den. It doubles as a full-length mirror; the company suggests you cap the lens when you’re not exercising. Of course, Fitbit figured out several years ago that fitness can be more fun when you challenge friends to join you.
The billions of dollars invested in these and other companies suggest it’s only a matter of time until we all sweat solo, together. Recently, I read a story by Lillian Ross, in The New Yorker, from February 1965 that got me thinking, of all things, about the next big thing: Might all this smart technology get us dancing in our homes?
I don’t mean a dance fitness class or a video game like Dance Dance Revolution. I mean dancing, dancing. Like the jitterbug or tango.
Fifty-four years ago, the Seeburg Corporation sold a coin-operated jukebox called the Seeburg Discotheque. The company marketed the machines, which each held up to 80 records, to taverns. As part of the kit, Seeburg also sold a dance floor at a cost of $70 a square yard.
“We want to bring dancing back to the local tavern, where everybody used to dance in the thirties,” a Seeburg vice president told Ross. “After the war, people started staying home and looking at television, regardless of what it was. Now the wife or girlfriend wants to go out. We give the corner tavern a night club the working man can afford. Five or six beers with the wife. And the fox trot. Or the Frug.”
The article sent me to Google. I had never seen the Frug, which I learned rhymes with rug. Or the Hully-Gully, another of the dances on offer. Here’s a video of the Hully-Gully.
There also was Bossa Nova, cha-cha, and a dance called The Cat. “The secret is noninterrupted music,” a company promotion manager said.
Imagine someone at home nowadays, dancing with an instructor or a partner via a smart studio. Could the combination of fitness and social networking combine into some force that has us frugging (or what have you) with others in the privacy of our homes? Might homes be sold with dance studios, or barres in the gym?
I mused. And then I read a piece about Bernie Sanders, in Politico, that instantly made the thought of all that dancing so real. In November, the Vermont senator attended a banquet with several hundred union members at a hall near the airport in Manchester, N.H. They ate steak and mashed potatoes.
Here’s what happened next:
Then Sanders, after repeating his call for an ‘unprecedented grassroots movement’ and a wholesale transformation of politics in the United States, began bobbing on the dance floor, laughing, clapping and twirling a procession of partners to the sounds of ‘I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),’ ‘Dancing Queen’ and ‘The Way You Do the Things You Do.’ Channeling the anarchist and civil rights advocate Emma Goldman, the Vermont senator told the crowd, ‘Our revolution includes dancing.’
Might we become a nation of dancing socialists? Could there be a presidential inaugural ball attended by revelers at home? If so, you read it here first.