NEEDHAM, Mass. For forty years Elvira Guffey was a social studies teacher in the public school system here from Monday at 8 a.m. to Friday at 3 p.m., but her true calling kicked in when Friday night dances began at 8:00 p.m. “Call me a mother hen if you want, but what we’re really on God’s green earth for is to reproduce and multiply,” she says with a faraway look in her eye as she sits outside the Chateau de France night club along Route 128. “I’d collar some of those slacker boys who just want to hang around the Coke machine and make smart remarks, and tell them it was their duty to grab a girl and get out on the dance floor.”
When she took retirement last year, Guffey found she didn’t miss grading tests or writing capital cities and principal exports on a blackboard; what she did miss was getting young people to connect with each other “instead of just drifting off to four years of college, then graduate school, while your most fruitful child-bearing years are flying by. A chance conversation with Tony DiSalvo, owner of Chateau de France, in a grocery store checkout line led to her “second career” as a freelance chaperone whose job is to get slightly-sloshed twenty-somethings to dance with each other.
“Elvira gets the derrieres out of the chair-e-eres,” DiSalvo says with a smile, but this reporter asks what some might consider a basic business question: since the margins at bars and restaurants is highest on liquor, doesn’t dancing cut into his profits? “I had a consulting company come in,” DiSalvo says. “They showed me how when people dance they forget about their drinks or spill them, so they have to buy more,” he says, tapping the side of his head with his finger.
Tonight is “Ladies Night” at Chateau de France, which means no cover charge for women, and as a result a bevy of hair-sprayed beauties lines the walls waiting to be asked to dance. “Do your stuff, Elvira,” DiSalvo says as he sips a white wine spritzer, and Guffey springs into action as the DJ pauses between songs.
“Okay, ladies, I want all of you to take off your right shoe and throw it into the middle of the dance floor.” The young women look at each other skeptically, but slowly, and one by one, they comply with sheepish smiles on their faces.
“Now, gentlemen, let’s cut the woe-is-me ‘I’m an incel’ crap. Grab a shoe, match it to the girl who has the other one, and get out there and dance.”
The men are, if anything, less enthusiastic than the women, but Guffney is taking no guff from them. “You there,” she snaps at a young man wearing a “City of Champions” t-shirt bearing the logos of the four local sports teams. “You want to dance with a real, live female tonight, or go home and play with yourself as usual?”
“Uh, okay,” he says, then picks up a white T-strap whose mate is found on the slender foot of Tina Mergen, a 23-year-old from Worcester who is studying to become a restaurant hostess at Lake Quinsigamond Junior College. “Is this yours?” he asks cautiously, and when she says “Yes,” the two find a spot under a disco ball where they begin to gyrate independently of each other, like moons of Jupiter.
“Way to get the party started,” DiSalvo says to Guffney as he leans back on the bar and watches his waitstaff scoop up half-finished drinks from the tables where dancers have left them. Then, under his breath to this reporter, he says “She more than pays for herself” with a look of low cunning.
A song ends and Guffney springs into action, picking out the couple who she thinks has the best dance moves to serve as her “starters.” “Okay, everybody–is there anybody here who doesn’t understand multiplication?” A few waggish hands go up, but she deliberately overlooks them. “Fine. The way this works is these two are going to start things off, then when I blow my disco whistle, they each go get a new partner–and so on.”
“And so on what?” Duane Carr, a 28-year-old licensed muffler repairman asks gingerly.
“Each time I blow the whistle, everybody has to find a new partner from the crowd–got it?”
“Oh, okay, right,” Carr says as his buddies punch him on the shoulders.
“Off we go,” Guffney calls out, and the sounds of local heroine Donna Summer’s disco hit “Love to Love You Baby” are heard coming over the club’s loudspeakers.
It looks like another successful evening is off and running for DiSalvo, and Guffney allows herself a break, ordering a seltzer-and-lime as she joins him at the bar. “I fear for the future of this country,” she says to this reporter. “The marriage rate is around 20 marriages per 1,000 women, and yet 13.8 marriages per every thousand ends in divorce,” she says as she shakes her head. “It’s two steps forward and one step back, while the Chinese are breeding like rabbits!”
The music ends and a slow song–The Bee Gees “How Deep Is Your Love”–begins. “Ladies Choice” Guffney announces into a microphone behind the bar; she has just taken a seat on a stool when she sees something that causes her to get up and scurry across the dance floor with a sawed-off ruler in her hand.
“Hey you two!” she shouts at a couple who are less dancing than humping. “Six inches between each couple at all times!”
The male of the couple looks up at her in surprise. “Lady–I’m 28 years old. This ain’t junior high.”
Guffney takes a deep breath and uncharacteristically backs down. “Sorry, I guess I had a Metamucil flash-back.”
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