In New York City, we’ve overused the cowboy emoji and the word yeehaw for years. We flock to the Dolly Parton–themed bar in Brooklyn, and we stand in line outside a New Mexican breakfast burrito place the night after hooking up with a guy whose parents live in Santa Fe (they retired there from Jersey). And of course, for no reason at all, we all own a pair of cowboy boots.
But now, finally, we have an actual reason to wear those boots. No, it’s not…taking care of cows? I’m not sure what these boots are actually supposed to be for, but I do know that mine are gleaming white and cannot, under any circumstances, get dirty. Every Wednesday at 8 p.m., I put them on and join a bunch of city folk in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park to line dance.
This article appears in Issue 26 of Alta Journal.
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Why? Well, it gives me a chance to wear my outfits! I already own the Daisy Dukes, the Kacey Musgraves shirt, the turquoise jewelry (understated) (mostly). The first time I went line dancing, I wore a blue gingham A-line dress that made me look like a Dallas church girlie. I called it my “my culture is not your costume” costume. Some people lean more “farmer”—one night I saw a person in overalls with no shirt or bra underneath, and for days afterward I shuddered while thinking about the chafing.
Picking your outfit is a huge part of Line in New York. Each week, I scroll through endless photos of the Chicks in the ’90s and Gram Parsons in the ’70s, trying to figure out what I can wear to look hot to all the women I have a crush on—clothes I’m sure to sweat through that evening. I have not so seriously considered wearing a bandanna as a shirt since watching season 2 of Survivor.
While there’s no defending our choice to wear black felt Stetsons in the summer, there is defending our boots. Cowboy boots are better suited for line dancing, it turns out, than a pair of sneakers. They let you slide and twist. They let you stomp. And maybe line dancing is appropriation, but hey, some people in New York are, actually, from Texas (though almost everyone in New York is, actually, from Ohio). Either way, there’s a difference between casually clubbing in a cow-print bikini top and taking the subway from Queens or Brooklyn across the East River to grapevine. For us, Line Is Life.
The New York crowd is different from what you might find at a random honky-tonk. Everyone is a public radio producer or “famous for being hot” or in school to become a psychoanalyst. Wednesday nights at this Gramercy Park ballroom are supposedly queer line dancing, though I haven’t found it to be any more queer than most spaces in New York. Which is to say: it’s a room of LGBTQ people and allies, but the thing about the lesbians is, most of them sure do seem to have a boyfriend.
We dance to everyone from Caroline Polachek to Keith Urban. When the baritone of a heretofore unheard-of male country-western singer comes over the speakers, we just pray someone else did the due diligence on whether this guy is racist.
When I showed a man who grew up in Texas a video of us dancing to “Sin Wagon,” he said, “This is not line dancing; this is aerobics.” We’re moving fast. We’re taking what should be four counts of light hip shaking and dropping to the floor so hard our pelvises might fall out. In horrible news for the people who live below me, I’ve started looking at videos of Beyoncé’s backup dancers for ideas on how to add sauce to my moves. I am very seriously trying to teach myself how to do the Worm. My Texas friend said that line dancing shouldn’t be about agility, “just drunken spins and stomps on the 2s and 4s.” We don’t do that in New York. In fact, one of our major rules is no drinks on the dance floor. (Another is be nice to yourself.)
Line events are crowded and getting more so. We’re experiencing unsustainable growth, and the club’s water keeps running out, which feels like the most genuinely southwestern thing about the whole experience. After a few dances, sweat drips down the mirrors from people humping the wall too hard during hip rolls. Regulars often give up on dressing country-western and wear whatever they own that covers the least amount of their bodies and wicks the most water. The room where we dance is a trap, and if there was a fire, we would all definitely die, killing the hottest people in New York City in one fell swoop. The city’s vibes would never recover.
Perhaps that’s why doing choreography to country songs with a bunch of strangers approximates a religious experience. I have found God in learning and then immediately forgetting a dance to Shania Twain’s “Any Man of Mine.” In scuffing my boots, in hitching my legs, in understanding, as a 32-year-old woman, the meaning of the term kick ball change.
I can’t wait to travel to the actual country-West, to roll into a honky-tonk and show off my moves and the third pair of cowboy boots I just bought myself after deciding I needed options. Because while we have a couple of hyperactive dances that are unique to New York, what’s great about Line is that so much is passed around via oral tradition: it’s the same wherever you go. And maybe I’ll get thrown out of a Lubbock bar for adding too many body rolls to Aces & Eights. To that I can only say: Yeehaw.•
Blythe Roberson is a comedy writer and the author of the books How to Date Men When You Hate Men and America the Beautiful?
