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Most little girls want to take dancing lessons. When I was in 6th grade I wanted dancing lessons, too, but I was a chubby girl with red pigtails and a face full of freckles.

Every week, I went to dancing class with a friend who was taking Isadora Duncan dancing. My parents were willing to pay for lessons, but I didn't participate. I sat in the bleachers at the dance studio and watched the barefooted, thin girls in their pale blue togas, filmy veils floating around their bodies. Because of my weight, I would not have been comfortable in such a costume.

The dance teacher said that ballet and dancing on toes was ugly and against nature. In Isadora Duncan's controversial style of dance, they did no high leaps but followed the natural pull of gravity, lying on the floor and kneeling like the figures on vases and sculptures in museums.

They ran through the carpeted studio scattering imaginary flower petals. They were blossoms in the wind or birds flying high above the ocean as the teacher played the music of Chopin on the piano. She emphasized that contrary to ballet theory, the center for all movement was not the spine but the solar plexus. They moved forward with the upper part of the body first, as no other dancers had done. I envied the dancers and stopped eating chocolate bars and strudel. I, too, wanted to feel so free, liberated from the earth and even graceful.

During middle school, I slimmed down, the freckles began to fade and I thought the red hair was kind of nice. When I got a little older, I tried square dancing and hated it. So klutzy! In high school, I learned Greek dancing, which was fun, but I never got the chance to do it again after the class was over. Then came the Latin phase -- Cha cha, Mambo, Rhumba, and Samba. Nice, but not thrilling.

The only dance I really liked during that time was the Polka, which I learned in high school. It turned out that my father also knew it and my mother did not. So, at every family wedding and bar mitzvah, as soon as the customary celebration Horah was over, my father would request a Polka. He would come to me, arms outstretched, and we would dance, whirling around and around the floor, as guests watched. I lost myself in the dance. This I loved and so did he. Even when he was old and in a wheelchair, we reminisced about those lovely dances where I felt so free and unrestrained. Wasn't this the feeling I'd dreamed of at the Duncan classes?

Then came disco dancing. I often wonder how I learned to do it. I remember asking my son to teach me and he responded with "Oh, Ma." I guess I watched and tried it with my husband in the corners of dance floors where nobody would pay attention to us. This dance was different. You had a partner, but you did not touch. After the first few attempts to coordinate arm movements with foot and hip movements, I got it and loved it. I loosened up when I danced and my whole body felt unstrung. I particularly liked Lionel Richie's song, "Dancing on the Ceiling."

Whenever there was a chance to do disco dancing, I was ready. One Christmas eve, my husband's firm had a party at a club on St. Mark's Place in New York's Greenwich Village. The place was done all in black -- floor, walls, ceiling, upholstery, and furniture. A metal staircase that looked as if it were made of big Erector Set pieces led to the upper floor where the disco was.

When I climbed up there, I saw a huge room, all black, with a domed ceiling, strobe lights and a phenomenal sound system. The place looked like the planetarium, or possibly the far side of the moon. Really wild! Tossing my shoes and purse in a corner, I grabbed my husband's hand and ran into the dancing, frenzied mob as the floor trembled with the booming sound. We danced until our group was thrown out of the place at midnight when it became a gay bar. That was dancing I'll never forget -- the kind of movement that was free, exciting, and liberation from the earth.

Some time afterward, we were at a wedding. There was a great band and when the disco music started, we were the first on the floor. In a short time, we were at it again. When we returned to our table, exhausted and thirsty, a jealous friend leaned over and hissed at me. "Show-off!" Neither she nor anyone else there had ever seen us dance like that. We are pretty quiet people really. We smiled at each other. We had shared the craziness again.

When we vacationed in Boca Raton, we discovered a bunch of discos. At night we would go disco-hopping, traveling from one to the next. Surprisingly, there was no charge other than the drinks you bought. Usually, we were the oldest couple on the floor but people smiled at us.

On cruises, we discovered that there would usually be a disco on one of the upper decks. We'd leave our couch-potato friends and end an evening there with the deafening noise, amid the wildly gyrating young people.

Now we don't go to discos anymore. But don't tell anyone -- sometimes we dance a little in the kitchen to Lionel Richie's "Dancing on the Ceiling." (See his video on YouTube.) No, I never tried belly dancing, but after seeing Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie," I think I missed a good one.

Toby Rosenstrauch, an award-winning columnist, lives in Boynton Beach, Fla.