Yesterday being Father’s Day, I spent a couple extra moments talking to the photograph of my dad on my altar. In the photograph, which was taken around 1942 on O’ahu, near Pearl Harbor, he looks serene, bemused, and as though he’d rather be someplace else. That was, apparently, his general take on his time in the Navy during WWII—a subject about which it was hard to get him to talk, when I was old enough to be asking, some 40 years later. He disliked the whole fighting/killing bit (which he avoided by being a radio controller, on the island and for short stints at sea), and would rather have been…

…dancing. Because my dad, David Matthew Conrad (1922-1996), was a champion jitterbug. Get OUT!, right? But it’s true. When he was in his late teens and his twenties, my dad was cutting loose with the hot wild acrobatic jive of the day, swinging the girls upside down, kicking and flapping to the sounds of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, and winning prizes for it. Newspaper accounts of the time used words like frenzy, pandemonium, and ecstasy to describe the jitterbug phenomenon. One psychologist warned of the “dangerously hypnotic influence…(music) cunningly devised to a tempo faster than 72 bars to the minute – faster than the human pulse.”

Thinking about that, about him, something clicked. Just the other day I was talking to Philo about how long it’s taken for me to shake off homogenizing influences of the hoopworld’s hegemony, how I still don’t really know what my own style is any more. He suggested I look back to old videos. I’ve looked, I said. I’m just chaotic, and goofy: I switch planes (from horizontal to vertical to diagonals) really fast and almost continuously… and it’s no fun to watch because it’s so jarring and jagged….

Who told you it’s no fun to watch?, he demanded, getting huffy. How I love Philo.

And so yesterday, on Father’s Day, I met up with the Bay Area Hoopers in Dolores Park, and I just abandoned myself. I flipped and swung and flapped and did crazy happy high steps; I stopped caring about elegance or flow or eye contact with any “audience.” I swayed and swerved and drooped and hopped. And I was thinking, you know, if my dad—the jitterbug dancer, radio crooner, sometimes painter, and closet writer, all those artistic personas beating like a heart under his three-piece suits on his way to work in contract law all those years he Provided for me and my mom— if my dad could see me today—me this crazy hooper, professional writer—oh, he’d be so happy, and so proud.