January 14th, 2014 - How to shag

One of my mom's favorite movies is Shag, staring Phoebe Cates and Bridget Fonda.  It's a coming of age story about a group of girls enjoying a weekend in 1960s Myrtle Beach.  And it's centered around a dance that plays an incredibly important part in my life.

The shag is a regional dance that is found primarily in the Carolinas.  It has ties with great beach music groups like The Drifters, The Coasters, and the Tams, and classic Motown acts like Sam Cooke, The Supremes, and The Temptations.  As this is some of my favorite music of all time, it's easy to see why learning how to shag would be a fun endeavor for me.

I asked one of the shag experts in my office, Laney Morris, to show me a thing or two about this dance.  I've worked with Laney for more than seven years now, so my biggest concern was to not break her feet.  Luckily, no one was harmed in the course of this lesson.

But there is another reason why I wanted to learn the shag today.  My parents met shagging, so you might say that without this dance, I wouldn't be here typing about learning it.  I owe the shag a lot, and I fully intend to put it to use in a couple of months.  Hopefully I'll have it down pat by the time April rolls around!


Other things I learned/looked up:

1) Scientology is nuts. I'm sure that this is not news to anyone who has seen the Tom Cruise video or heard rumors about it's "space opera" origin story.  But check out "Going Clear" by Lawrence Wright, which I finished reading today.  I picked it up last week to answer a question I had about the bad guy's name in Scientology (Xenu...a despotic space overlord), and decided to read the whole thing.  And what I found was that the crazy only BEGINS at Xenu.  It gets worse after that.