I was in the forest practicing doing the Charleston where no one could see me. My ankles were going every which way and my furry paws were jutting to this side and that. I closed my eyes and saw the band on the other side of the dance hall.
As I spun around, I opened my eyes and saw a 400-pound bear galloping towards me. I leapt out of the way and into a tree, at which point I noticed two other bears chasing the first. The first bear slipped out of sight, at which point his pursuers noticed me and started climbing my tree and shouting all sorts of unfriendly-sounding things in my general direction. Something about a few hundred dollars owed from botched bets on badger boxing, something about hibernating with other bears' honeys, something about months of unsettled tabs from the Perilous Shore, something about toenail clippings left in beehives.
I expressed the sincerest bewilderment, but they would have none of it. They grabbed a fallen branch off the forest floor and poked me out of the tree. I fell over backwards and landed miraculously on my feet. Without a thought, I took three steps forward, point the toe, three steps backward, point the toe.
“Charleston. Charleston. Made in Carolina.”
Bewildered, the other bears facing me began mirroring me.
“Yeah that’s the idea! … Some dance. Some prance.”
Drool-soaked grins spread across the bears’ faces. Next, I added in the arms, and clumsily they tried to follow suit; more often than not, their arms would follow their legs rather than alternating sides, so that they resembled robotic punching machines.
“I’ll say there’s nothing finer than the Charleston! Charleston!”
They were still in the game, however, until I added the ankle movements.
“Lord how you can shuffle. Every step you do leads to something new.”
They were starting to stumble pretty badly, so I pushed the tempo and reduced them to a furry heap on the forest floor and made my escape.
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