LET’S TWIST AGAIN LIKE WE DID LAST SUMMER, ONLY A LITTLE
FURTHER APART PLEASE THAN WE WERE BACK THEN
It was a simple dance called the Twist because all you did was that–twist. It would work perfectly today in our socially-distant society. So let’s twist again.
The twist originated in the late fifties among teenagers and was popularized by Chubby Checker in his debut of the song on a national TV show hosted by my old friend, Dick Clark. What made me think of this was my wife Rita’s receiving today a video of the Twist from her cousin Marisa Costa Terra in Brazil.
In case you’re too young or you’re having memory loss, the twist goes like this.
You twist standing with your feet shoulder-width apart. The torso may be squared to the knees and hips or turned at an angle so one foot is farther forward.
Your arms are held out from the body, bent at the elbow. Your hips, torso, and legs rotate on the balls of your feet as a single unit, with your arms staying stationary. The feet grind back and forth on the floor, and the dance can be varied in speed, intensity, with as much vertical height as necessary.
Occasionally one leg is lifted off the floor for styling, but generally the dance posture is low with feet in contact with the floor and very little vertical motion. The moves include the mashed potato, swimming, drowning, twisting, arm swing and single leg twist. While twisting, it’s important how you look at your partner.
The sexier you look at each other the better. And the better your night would turn out! Oh yea!