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Beryl Lieff Benderly (6/60) details dance experience at Hortense Greenwald’s Dancing School:
Like Judie Tiplitz Jacobs (1/63), I also took both dancing lessons at Hortense Greenwald's Dancing School over the Mayfair Theater and lived on Grumman Avenue. Unlike Judie, however, I took ballroom dancing and, because the lessons were in the evening, my parents drove me as they didn't want me walking alone in the dark. I was about 12, which meant that I was taller than many of the boys, but Miss Greenwald (at least I think she was Miss) always made sure everyone had a partner and paired us up regardless of height. We learned all the popular dances; fox trot, mambo, cha-cha, rhumba, even waltz, and of course, jitterbug (this, of course, was also enhanced by what we did at Weequahic dances).
She also taught us the etiquette of the dance floor, including accepting an invitation to dance, boys cutting in, clapping at the end, thanking one's partner and even using dance cards. Nobody actually wrote in the cards, but, as I recall, they were provided to the girls at our prom. This all was, of course, during the last of the days when old-style ballroom dancing played an important role in social life and before pair dancing by young people dissolved into the twist and its successors, in perhaps the first or second year of college. But our parents, who had danced all through the Depression and the war, continued ballroom dancing at all kinds of social events for decades after that. Like many people of their generation, my parents were very good social dancers.
I am grateful for the fine instruction Miss Greenwald provided. I still keep the ability to pick up the beat and execute the steps of all the dances she taught us. My husband has always been a good dancer, too, so we have had lots of fun on the dance floor for decades afterward. While I was in high school, may family used to stay at the LaReine-Bradley hotel in Bradley Beach, where there was dancing for the grownups almost every night, and I was able to participate in that. And at many weddings, bar mitzvahs and the like over the years, my husband and I have "cut a rug," often to the amazement of younger people who have no idea how to do what we were doing; cha-cha, say or semi-complex Lindy breaks. We have long been among the best jitterbuggers on the floor doing our New York-area style. Some good friends of ours, also excellent jitterbuggers, danced Chicago style, so it was sometimes a little confusing when we switched partners, which we often did. But we'd soon catch on.
For the 50th birthdays of my husband and one of the Chicago-bred friends, which fell a day apart, we joined forces and gave a sock hop. We rented the gym at our son's private high school and hired a DJ with lots of 1950s records, both slow and fast dances, and invited all our friends to come in appropriate attire. I made felt poodle skirts for my daughter and me. Lots of other women also came in similar full skirts. Amusingly enough, lots of the guys came in T shirts and jeans with wide belts with the buckle to the side, with their hair slicked back (most still had hair) and even with cigarette packs rolled up in a sleeve (though by then, hardly anyone smoked). Knowing these guys, I'm sure that in high school they were more of the pocket protector and slide rule-case persuasion, but you can see what they secretly aspired to.
Covid, obviously, has brought couples dancing to an end. Even for years before that, young brides and grooms had been taking lessons specifically to do a dance at their weddings. Ballroom dancing obviously played no role in their lives, but was only a relic of what they see as traditional wedding protocol. But thanks to my mother's enrolling me with Miss Greenwald, I have enjoyed decades of fun. I actually had never thought specifically of my debt to Miss Greenwald until I read Judie's note, so I thank her, too, for reminding me. Beryl
Warren Bratter’s (1/60) memories of Bradley Beach, Part II:
Although there was no Bradley Beach equivalent of the French Riviera’s casinos, the LaReine Hotel, a massive, almost disproportionately large, white colonnaded, wooden ocean front hostelry on the corner of Ocean and LaReine Avenues, attracted a wealthy and dressed to-the-nines crowd. In front of that hotel, standing with our backs to the boardwalk and the ocean, on any summer night a group of late teens – Weequahicers and new summer friends, me included, would stand on the corner of LaReine and Ocean talking trash about our respective high school athletic teams, painfully attempting to flirt with the young ladies from such exotic places as Bayonne, Hackensack, Jersey City, and Springfield. Suddenly, we’d all stop in mid-conversation as we watched older men in black pants and white jackets accented by black bow ties and two-toned shoes walk with their mink-stolled women from the Hotel LaReine’s main entrance to waiting Caddies.
They would drive off into the fog which almost always rolled in from the Atlantic Ocean to gamble in Long Branch or even nearby Deal. Decades later during a long sabbatical from university life I worked as the Senior Editor for an international foreign language book and film company. One evening during the Cannes Film Festival, I took a lazy stroll along that city’s legendary Mediterranean Sea promenade, the Croisette. Surrounded by international beau monde amblers and revelers of the film world, my brain made an implausible role reversal. These people looked for all the world to me not like European jet setters, but like those elegant Bradley Beach merry makers I used to see so many decades ago at the Hotel Bradley LaReine from our own New Jersey’s Cote ‘d’ Azure.
Bradley Beach’s equivalent of the Croisette, the Boardwalk, though a less glamorous and splintery substitute for Cannes’ palm tree lined promenade, was for us Weequahicers an ambulatory carnival. Actually, there were two Boardwalks; one was the above-ground surface walkway, above ground and the other, below the wooden planks, under the Boardwalk. The spiky open-air Boardwalk was a singular social and physical space for our beach going community. Whether swim-suited or street clothed, whether young or old, whether holding hands as a summer romance couple, or a Weequahic-made couple seated on the ocean facing benches schmoozing; whether leaning against the metal fences that lined the Boardwalk and BS’ing with friends about how you dove and swam under the last rope without the life guards catching you; or maybe just standing around with a group of Weequahic friends looking at and admiring the passersby, or spending nickels at the Boardwalk Arcade playing ski ball or pinball, the Boardwalk was our endless “moveable feast.”
Under the Boardwalk, though, was a different world. Like the words sung in the Drifter’s pop classic, “Under the boardwalk, down by the sea, yeah on a blanket with my baby is where I'll be…,” our own coupled Weequahicers were under our own boardwalk kissing necking and smoking cigarettes. It was a forbidden part of that sandy Bradley Beach underworld. Warren
(Part III of “Bratter on Bradley Beach” will appear in the “WHS Note” next week)
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