Please allow me to add a word about one of the many things that Derb has right in his SNF piece: disco as a brief return to the ballroom.

It so happens that during the tail end of the disco era — or perhaps the proper term would be the booty end — I worked part-time at a dance studio helping to teach, among other things, cotillon classes. The owner and his other professional instructors were a generation removed, men of the late 1940s through the mid 1960s, men who had swung and crooned and mamboed. They loved disco. They saw it as offering the potential to rejuvenate real couple dancing (and, yes, maintain or increase demand for their services). They actually liked the music. Then came the New Wave with swooping locks, and Grandmaster Flash, and hair bands, and Madonna, and it all faded away. Until Dancing With The Stars.