LETTERS FROM HOME: DO A LITTLE DANCE, MAKE A LITTLE LOVE, GET DOWN TONIGHT

June 25, 1998

Dear Leslie,

If disco had an anthem, it was K.C. and the Sunshine Band's unforgettable ode to banality "Get Down Tonight."

"Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight."

A good barometer of a culture or an era is the quality of the music it produces. The '70s imbibed air.

Disco was canned anti-music that introduced a lot of good rock 'n' roll musicians to other means of employment because club owners could pay a deejay much less than a four-piece band.

But I went to discos. It was the only thing to do if you were of a certain age and single in Cape Girardeau. I sat with my gin and tonic hating the music and wondering what everyone -- myself especially -- was doing there.

The disco '70s: People worked regular jobs then got extravagantly dressed up to go to a nightclub where they spent the evening doing silly dances like The Hustle and snorting cocaine.

They then went home with their most recent dance partner. It was a game of sexual musical chairs: Last person without a partner goes home alone.

That was the fantasy. To be accurate, plenty of people did go home alone. But the atmosphere was so charged that those who did felt pretty inept. Take it from me.

Watching the new movie "The Last Days of Disco" is like reliving a period of your life and still not understanding what happened.

I hoped the movie might provide some insight into the darkness of the '70s. Instead it was like a "Seinfeld" episode without the humor -- all insufferable characters and angst over nothing in particular.

There had to be more going on than that.

Disco started out as lovable John Travolta trying to ride a white suit out of Brooklyn but it stopped at "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" and a lot of other places you wouldn't want to be caught dead.

Perhaps it was a natural progression from the "free love" '60s, when young people really believed you could love the one you're with. You still could in the '70s, but the consequences left us spinning like a mirrored ball.

Disco didn't give us AIDS but living in a fantasy world did.

Recently I found myself in the discomfiting position of trying to defend another back-to-the-'70s movie, "Boogie Nights," to two women who have Ph.Ds and teen-age daughters. I think it's the daughters that would make you wonder about a movie that attempts to find the humanity in the pre-AIDS world of sexual freedom represented by pornographic movies.

I didn't do well. I said the movie captured a time in space, the almost surreal decadence of a short period when sexual freedom seemed written between the lines of the First Amendment.

I joked about it bringing back lots of memories.

"Boogie Nights" is the schizophrenic underside of the disco '70s. To me, the characters are more honest than those in "The Last Days of Disco," much more aware of the shadows thrown by this era that spawned both incurable diseases and the reactionary politics of Reaganism -- hardly a coincidence.

We did a little dance. We paid the piper.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.