This is the memory palace, Meme de Mayo. The conductor counted off a one and a two and a three and a

four. And the dancers hit the floor, young twirling couples. A boy and a girl, her head

nuzzled into his neck, his head and her hair, clinging tight. His hands and her hips, her hands

and his strong shoulders, ignoring the four or four three step of the fox trot, their bodies

finding their own rhythm, lost in their own world, the boy and the girl. Because they had been

dancing for 21 hours. Tiny lights flitted through the room, playing on the faces in the audience,

bouncing off the mirror ball that hung over the dance floor. People had come to watch them dance,

to stop by the out of one ball room and the 168th on their way to another dance hall,

through some Harlem hotspot. They leaned in the railing over looking the floor,

drinking a seltzer or a near beer, sticking some home brew from a flask, maybe some Canadian whiskey.

They thought their co-worker was talking out of his ass but he really did have the hook up.

They sit on the bleachers and shout cat calls and hang in there through the smoke filled hall

to five couples still dancing in the marathon. The crowd's growing larger as the night goes longer.

Because nobody wants to miss out on history. Surely some in the audience had already seen it,

just a few weeks before, right there on the park hay floor of the Audubon. When Alma Cummings,

a 32 year old dance teacher just moved to the city from Texas, dance for 27 hours,

50 minutes on, 10 minutes off, burning through six partners on her way to a world record,

and to an instant celebrity that was a brand new thing and was intoxicating.

And inspiring. And had young men and especially young women lining up at ballrooms and dance halls in

New York and Houston and Erie, Pennsylvania, pretty much all over, to get numbers pinned to the

backs of their shirts, and see if their legs and their shoes could carry them to a cash prize,

and a moment different from the ones working the assembly line, or driving rivets pulling up

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