The following is an edited transcript of a segment that aired Tuesday on the public radio program Civic Matters. The guest is Delmar Puce, executive director of the American Waltz Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group representing roughly 1,100 dues-paying members.
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HOST: A federal judge has halted construction on the White House ballroom pending environmental and procedural review. Your organization called the ruling, quote, “a mass displacement event.”
PUCE: That’s correct. As of Friday, the nation’s waltzers are without options.
HOST: Without options.
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PUCE: Without options.
HOST: There are, by conservative estimate, forty thousand ballrooms in the United States.
PUCE: None of them are the ballroom.
HOST: Help me understand the distinction.
PUCE: Have you ever attempted a Viennese turn on hotel carpet? The pattern alone is hostile. Burgundy paisley, engineered by a committee to hide vomit. You cannot waltz on carpet. You can shuffle on carpet. A shuffle is a lie you tell your partner.
HOST: What about civic spaces? Elks lodges, VFW halls, community centers?
PUCE: The floor at the lodge in my district is tacky. Physically tacky. Forty years of spilled light beer have created a surface with memory. You step, and the room decides whether it’s giving the shoe back.
HOST: Cruise ships have ballrooms.
PUCE: On a ship the floor moves independently of the dancers, which introduces a second, uninvited partner: the Atlantic Ocean. I’m not dancing with the Atlantic. It doesn’t lead. It doesn’t follow. It just does whatever it wants and then everybody’s sick.
“We were promised a surface”
HOST: Let’s talk about the injunction itself. The White House ballroom was a privately financed project, roughly three hundred million dollars, ninety thousand square feet, funded by donors whose names were released in a font size that suggested reluctance. The court found the demolition proceeded without required review. Your members had no formal role in the project. Were any of them ever going to be permitted inside?
PUCE: That was not the point.
HOST: It seems like it might be some of the point.
PUCE: We were promised a surface. A national surface. You don’t have to be allowed on a thing for it to matter that it exists. That’s what a country is.
HOST: How are members coping?
PUCE: Poorly. We have a couple in suburban Ohio doing box steps in a Panera parking lot after close, because the asphalt out there is smooth and the lights stay on until eleven. We have a woman in Scottsdale who joined a CrossFit purely for floor access. They let her have twenty minutes between classes. She waltzes alone under a pull-up rig while men deadlift six feet from her elbow and one of them keeps asking if she’s okay.
HOST: Is she okay?
PUCE: She’s a competitive waltzer. That’s a separate question.
HOST: There are digital alternatives. I’ve seen at least three startups pitching virtual ballroom environments.
PUCE: Twelve million dollar seed round, two founders in performance fleece, and the product is a hallucinated partner with a full second of latency. You lead, and one second later a smeared woman with the wrong number of fingers agrees with you. My members have described it as haunted. One man wept. Not because it was beautiful — because he could feel it learning from him.
HOST: There’s also a growing waltz presence on social media. Younger dancers, the “waltzcore” trend—
PUCE: Nineteen-year-olds doing a turn and a half in a thrifted gown for a brand deal with an electrolyte company. That’s not a constituency. That’s content. When the courts came for our ballroom, not one of them posted.
HOST: What happens now?
PUCE: We wait. The Coalition has filed an amicus brief. We have eleven hundred members and a mailing list, and the average age of that list is sixty-eight, so I would characterize our timeline as urgent.
HOST: And until then?
PUCE: Until then we hold frame in the parking lot at Panera and we count to three and we do it again, because the alternative is standing still, and standing still is how a nation forgets it ever had a ballroom in the first place.