Anniversary Waltz.

WE HAVE A LITTLE SECTION this month devoted to social dancing. But the more time I spend in this racket, the more convinced I become that all the dancing we cover--and do--is social. Let me take advantage (just one more time, I promise ...) of my august position and shamelessly exploit my own relatives as a case in point.

Aunt Reva and Uncle Al will celebrate their sixtieth anniversary December 1. They met in 1935 in Detroit at a modern dance performance. They both were in it. "I was in the New Dance Group," Uncle Al said by phone from their home in Mission Viejo, California. "It was a modern dance group run by, at that time, a very left-wing oriented group. We gave a performance on an antiwar subject."

"It was a whole evening of different dance groups," Aunt Reva, on the extension, added.

The New York Times recently ran a marvelous Sunday piece about how left-wing politics were expressed through the arts in the 1930s and 1940s, but as our New York editor, Wendy Perron, pointed out, the story didn't mention dance at all. How could Samuel G. Freedman have omitted something that changed my family?

"My sister Rose was also in this group," Uncle Al said. "Rose had a friend named Reva, and Reva had a brother named Martin, and he met Rose."

And that was how I happened to have an aunt and an uncle, brother and sister, who married a sister and brother. If you know what I mean. Al Sniderman fell in love with Reva Berman. Martin Berman fell in love with Rose Sniderman. (They are my relatives via my dad, who, as I mentioned last January, met my mom when he was on his way to take a ballroom dancing lesson. He skipped it. They were married for fifty years, and he never learned to dance.)

The Sniderman family reunion, a triennial floating bash for about 100 (last August in San Diego), gave evidence of that shared gene pool. Aunt Reva and Uncle Al had four kids, Aunt Rose and Uncle Mart had two, and I have an awesome number of cousins once removed who look a lot like each other. And the other thing about the Sniderman/Berman tribe is how much they dance, and what they dance. In a family rich in interfaith marriages and diverse ways of thinking, dancing, at least at reunions like this one, has become almost like a religion.

At the big party Saturday night, we danced with fervor to the DJ's golden oldies. The steps varied with the ages and hometowns of the steppers, who came from all over the country (though it was pointed out, as we all stood on an imaginary map of the U.S., that its center was conspicuously vacant). As for age, well, let's just say that for some of us, the swim is not a quaint and ancient artifact. The swim lives, as do the jitterbug, lindy, fox trot, cha-cha, two-step, stroll, hustle, frug, Watusi, and, for Reva and Al's grandson the software engineer (the family is also absolutely rife with engineers), with a little braid sticking out of his 'fro, hip-hop and raving. Sometimes that night they were all going on simultaneously. The floor shook, the music thumped, and the tiniest members of the clan, 2- and 3-year-olds in their party best, jumped and giggled and rolled around on the parquet, happily underfoot.

Uncle Al stopped modern dancing, he admitted a little sheepishly, almost as soon as he met Aunt Reva, pushing instead to finish his engineering degree. Rose and Reva continued modern dance for a while, and Reva remembers taking class in summer from dancers who stopped by in Detroit during their tours. There were dancers like Martha Graham and--"What's the guy's name, the real tall fellow?" she asked Uncle Al, "Something Lemon?"

"Jose Limon?" I offered.

"That's right," my aunt said. "He was great, dynamic every time he moved. We learned so much from them."

"We got into folk dancing much later," Uncle Al said, "after we were married. We also learned square dancing. But in square dancing, if somebody doesn't know the call, it could foul up the whole square. If you don't know exactly what you're doing in folk dancing, you can catch up. We're going square dancing tonight in Costa del Sol, and Wednesday night we're going folk dancing at the Leisure World cultural club."

"We don't jump around like we used to," Aunt Reva said with a laugh.

"Rose and Mart used to belong to a folk dance group that's still in existence in Detroit," Uncle Al said. "Lois still goes."

That's my cousin Lois, Rose and Mart's daughter, a doctor and a travel agent and an absolutely fabulous folk dancer. At the reunion, she taught us all, calmly, patiently, unflappably. I watched her and thought of her parents, now gone, my parents, the fun of our childhood visits.

The folk dancing, some Israeli, some Eastern European, some authentic and some not, alternated with the DJ's music all night. We formed lines and circles and some of us stepped on each other's feet and some of us knew what we were doing. (And will I tell you who was who? Ha)!

The music was measured or fast; the CDs and tapes, depending on age and wear, smooth or scratchy. I'd been dancing to some of the tunes since childhood, at these reunions, at weddings, in youth groups. Others were brand new. We linked arms, laughing, and snaked and chained around the room, some of us with smart flourishes, some of us rushing to catch up, breathless, delighted, a family of families, a family of dancers.