Bruno on how people meet

After World War II, the Allied armies occupied the countries that they had just liberated. One of the soldiers had trouble meeting girls and complained to a local man: “I can’t attract girls. I look good and am a hero who helped to liberate your country. I have money and wear a nice uniform. You, on the other hand, have none of that, and I see you with girls all the time. Why is it?”

“Your problem is,” the local man said, “that you are too direct, brutally macho and not at all romantic. You must take your time, be gentle and act sophisticated. When you want to meet a girl, take a shower, smell good, bring flowers and buy her a nice meal. Talk about arts, nature and poetry.” It is so simple, it is crazy, the soldier thought. The next time he meets a girl, he buys two hot dogs and asks:

“Do you know Pushkin and Tolstoy?”

“Yes, I read their books,” she says.

“Ok”, the soldier replies, “let’s go to my place and make love!”

– Post-war joke in occupied Europe.

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From time immemorial, marriages across many cultures have been arranged by parents or by professional matchmakers. The purpose was to match eligible children with those of the same social class, similar interests and education, and last but not least, to protect the family wealth.

About 150 years ago, when it was becoming the norm for young people could select their own mates, the first hurdle was where and how to meet. Young ladies of that time were sent to finishing schools, to focus on social graces, etiquette, and deportment rather than academic rigour. The primary goal was to prepare the upper-class girls for marriage and to become cultured hostesses.

Boys and girls could not meet in wild college parties, as most girls were not allowed to go out unchaperoned. Sometimes their parents facilitated the process by inviting suitable suitors to their homes, or to meet in churches or in theatres.

Bruno asked his mother one day how she met his father:

“After returning from our summer residences, social life began. Every Monday evening, we went to the English Club, and on Wednesdays, to the French Club to socialize and take dance lessons. In the season we went to balls, there were many kinds. At one of them, I don’t remember exactly which, my brother introduced me to your dad. We had known each other for several years, but after that, it wasn’t long before he asked me to marry him.”

Bruno and his contemporaries found the best place to meet girls were the dance lessons organized by senior high schools or colleges. They did not just teach dancing, but also how to behave civilly. In Brno, the best dance academy was run by Mr. and Mrs. Kadlec.

Elegantly dressed, he in a tuxedo, she in an evening gown, they welcomed their charges. There was a dress code: pants, shirts with ties, and jackets for the boys, and cocktail dresses or full-length gowns for the girls. Mr. Kadlec taught classical ballroom dance steps to the rhythm of Viennese or English waltzes, foxtrots, quicksteps, jives, as well as Latin tangos, sambas, cha-cha, paso doble and polkas.
Mrs. Kadlec, draped like a towel over Mr. Kadlec’s right arm, maintaining a proper frame, glided gracefully across the dance floor.

The fifteen-year-old snotty-nosed boys, sweating with excitement in dark suits and wearing white gloves were allowed, even prodded, to hold the girls close to their bodies in a clumsy way under the supervision of the girls’ mothers, sitting in the gallery.

After the initial demonstrations and a short practice session, the stakes were raised when Mr. Kadlec invited “gentlemen,” meaning the snotty-nosed kids to “ask the ladies for a dance.”
This is how courtships often started in the 1950s. Strict etiquette was observed, girls were coy, and boys tried to be gentlemen. The rules of the mating game were vague, and the process was lengthy. It was romantic, albeit slow, and worked well from a pragmatic point of view.

Bruno met Elsa on a volleyball court, but their first date was in a dance class. They were well matched, the same age and had similar proportions. In addition to taking courses, they went dancing to Sunday afternoon teas, even the fancy balls organized by schools. It ended in church.

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Bruno and Elsa’s love of ballroom dancing followed them to Canada, but it was hard to find venues that played the right music. If bars had dance floors, the music was played by disc jockeys. The young crowd just twisted on the dance floor to any rhythm. It was no-touch dancing, and it was hard to know who was dancing with whom. So, Bruno and Elsa took up dance lessons again.

The lessons were good, but they needed to find places to practice. Ballroom dancing requires orchestras that can play everything from Viennese or English waltzes to Latin dances, with the foxtrots, polkas, two steps, quicksteps and others in between. Someone recommended a bar in Inn on the Lake, Bonavista, where a duo, Jana & Danny, play dance music that “covers big band, the swing 60’s, groovy 70’s, Latin and Broadway.” They were very good and were coincidentally Bruno and Elsa’s countrymen. They became regulars.

Jana and Danny were born in Litomyšl, a small town in Czechia, where the world-renowned composer Bedřich Smetana, was also born. Jana studied singing at the conservatory, and Danny deserted his career in mechanical engineering and learned to play piano. In the 1960s, they joined a big band and later, were offered jobs in Austria with a small five-piece band.

They immigrated in the early 1980s to Calgary, where they continued their careers, locally performing in clubs, individual events, and on cruise ships.

They play with ease, emanating joy. However, that lightness and joy are deceiving because making something look simple and easy takes a lot of skill, time, and hard work.

To sound like a small band, they use a digital audio workstation for recording, editing, mixing, and producing audio files. Because there is nothing commercially available with the quality and precision they want, they record their own. On a keyboard connected to a computer, he can play solos sounding like various musical instruments, He has to switch the keyboard to those instruments and record their sounds one by one until he has recorded them all. Bruno would like to describe and explain the essence of their craft better, but he is only a music lover who limits himself to stating that what Jana and Danny do, how they do it, and how thoroughly they do it is a high science and great art that keeps us dancing!

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Nowadays, the romantic way of courting is too slow and not all that popular. People are busy. They find partners in the workplace, through sports, or even in bars, but these are incidental happenings. For faster results, they go to dating sites.

It is very straightforward. The goal is to find a partner, just as if looking for new appliances or picking a vacation condo on a beach somewhere:

“I am looking for a partner, this is what I look like, this is what defines me, and this is how much money I make. Please, send your curriculum vitae.”

A problem is that thanks to artificial intelligence and Photoshop, people are easily deceived. Many age-old sayings apply, like “buyer beware,” or in England, “buying a pig in a poke,” or the Czech warning not to “buy a cat in the bag.” All of the above can also lead to “buyer’s remorse.”

These super-efficient practices bypass romance, exciting clandestine meetings, overcoming shyness, fluttering hearts and essentially all the excitement of falling in love gradually. What a shame!

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If meeting your soulmate requires patience, serendipity, and a lot of things going right, the dating sites and social media “cut to the chase.” Just like finding good dance music is more difficult than just beating a drum and plucking the double bass.