"American Bandstand" was my conduit to my generation. There I learned all the '60s dances, rocked and rolled, and got soul before soul was a train. I twisted, mashed potatoes, boogalooed, and jerked in private because I wasn't allowed to dance. Not even at my school's prom. My rural community had its own sepia-toned "Footloose" story that had a happy ending my senior year when we got a new principal and a new view of what it was to be a teen in 1969. But I already knew. I became acquainted with American adolescence where it was recorded for all time. So, I saved all the dance moves I wasn't allowed to execute at W.D. Spigner High School's first prom - because my grandmother said, "You can go, but it will be the death of me!" then bragged to her schoolteacher friends that I didn't want to go "act like a heathen" - for the college dances I never missed. I was a great dancer it turned out, shaking my groove thang at my grandmother's alma mater and testing if I really would be the death of her by getting kicked out for being a "militant" between dances and concerts where I saw Johnnie Taylor, Ike & Tina Turner, Smokie Robinson & The Miracles, and The Four Tops live. I was quite well acquainted with them all and had been entertained by them secretly in my grandmother's "no sinful bootie-shaking allowed" living room. They were introduced to me by none other than the Pied Piper that led my generation straight to hell doing the bunny hop, Mr. Dick Clark. Thank you for the music that taught me how to dance, connected me with adolescence more than any other single factor, and for proving that dancing is the purest form of movement, Mr. Clark. Thanks to you, I was a teenager