The Dance Floor, Gymnasium, Darton Hall College, July 7, 2000

As a setting, the shadowy, polished dance floor, the center of the first night of the reunion, represents the opportunity for the Class of 1969 to shed the accumulated inhibitions of their adulthood and tap into the raw sexual energy and primitive urgencies of their lost youth. It is bittersweet. The dance floor is haunted, as it were, decorated with yearbook pictures of the classmates, a reminder of their lost youth. The dance floor offers attendees the chance to reconnect with the body, to listen to its crazy rhythms and to respond, rather than interdict, those urges. The dance floor thus symbolizes freedom. The opening chapter defines each of the principal characters by the way they engage or do not engage the beckoning call of the dance floor. David Todd, for instance, painfully aware of his prosthetic leg, hangs about the fringes...