Hello, there. That sure is a pretty dress. Would you care to dance?

Psych! I don’t want to dance with you, lovely as you are. Don’t take it personally. If Aphrodite herself swooped down from the mythical realm and tried leading me to the dance floor, I’d shove her into the coat room and run away.

I don’t dance, my friends, and haven’t since the incident.

OK, there was no incident. There is no secret dance floor horror from my deep dark past to explain this aversion to wiggling, gyrating and getting my boogie on in general. I don’t want to put my left foot in, I don’t want to put my right foot out. I don’t want to do the hokey pokey or shake it all about.

And that’s what it’s all about.

It wasn’t always this way. Back in the gaudy days of glittering balls and bell-bottom pants, I had a fling with disco that I seldom talk about. The Bee Gees were still around, and Donna Summer and some freaky, wiggling upstart named Michael Jackson. In a moment of what must have been fever delirium, I decided I should take disco lessons and start swinging my hips with the rest of the world. I mean, hell, I already had the feathered hair.

I had no love of disco, mind you. The main idea in my pimply teen brain was that dancing was the fastest way to get to all those pretty girls who populated the dance floor in sweet-smelling swarms. It might have worked, too, only I made the mistake of telling my older brother, who abhorred disco with a rock ‘n’ roll passion, about this plan.

ME: “So, I’m thinking about taking disco lessons.”

BROTHER: “I see.” And then he gently lifted the stereo arm off the record and Uriah Heep stopped playing at once.

I awoke days later with a buzzing head and a swollen face. The doctor staring down at me looked like Tom Jones. When I asked if I was going to make it, Dr. Jones flicked his hair back, danced across the room and said: “Ah, you will survive.”

You see what I did there? All part of the evasive steps I will take to avoid dancing. Back in livelier times, when I spent four nights a week at the clubs, it was tricky. When a pretty or semi-pretty girl asked me to dance, I would launch into some overlong story about how I couldn’t dance because of a horrible knee injury sustained when I was forced to jump from a high-speed train to save a drowning child and a box of kittens who were being attacked by a shark in a tornado.

Every now and then, a young lady would find these exotic tales charming and inventive and a wonderful night would ensue. More frequently, they wandered off to dance the night away with some dude with a neck chain and a Camaro.

But, whatever. I don’t like to dance and I was willing to make those sacrifices in order to avoid it. Now and then, I’d go out to the dance floor and jump straight up and down for an hour, but that is as close as I ever got to getting my groove on. Eventually, I grew out of the club scene and that was that.

Only that WASN’T that. My friends, you may think you can escape the hip-flinging pressure of dance by getting married, but it’s a lie. Even if you manage to work “will not, under any circumstances, do The Hustle” into your wedding vows, sooner or later, that woman you married is going to insist on dancing. And not slow dancing, which is perfectly acceptable, but that boogie-fever crap.

“Everyone else is dancing,” that woman you married will say, in the mosquito buzz voice she reserves for these moments alone. “Don’t you love me any more?”

Your only way out of this, friend, is divorce or actually inflicting a gruesome leg injury upon yourself, which is why I have this limp.

“Those who dance,” said George Carlin, “are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music.”

“Almost nobody dances sober,” offers H.P. Lovecraft, “unless they happen to be insane.”

Relevance? None. I’m just distracting you again so you’ll forget about this ridiculous dancing stuff.

Hey! Look over there, in the coat room!

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer suffering from post-traumatic dance disorder. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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