Dancing the Virginia Reel

Last night I was watching the 1944 movie Meet Me in St. Louis, which takes place in 1903 and stars Judy Garland. The movie includes a scene where young people attending a family party dance a Virginia Reel.

This scene reminded me that we pupils at St. John learned to dance the Virginia Reel as part of our physical education. We never danced the Virginia Reel at our own parties in 1963, but I suppose that young people actually did do such dances socially in earlier decades. The movie depicted many interesting details about American life in the early 1900s.

I remember that we learned the Virginia Reel when we were in about seventh grade. Dancing that involved holding girls' hands was creepy to the max, but we all were learning about puberty by seventh grade, so we resigned ourselves to beginning adult lives that did involve some inter-sex hand-holding.

Here is a YouTube video of pupils, grades 5 to 8, dancing the Virginia Reel with a live band. We at St. John sure never had a live band. We used a record player.

The kids in the following video are really bad dancers. We at St. John danced much better than those little dopes.

On the other hand, the kids in the following video dance it a hundred times better than we did at St. John.