Swing High, Swing Low

"I'm a medical guinea pig," Steve says. "They were, like, 'Let's try this and see if it works.' This was 47-some-odd years ago. They were just doing their best."

As a boy, Steve proved agile and daring. His father built a hockey rink in the back yard, and Steve glided around it fearlessly. He loved to ski, racing down the slope, bouncing effortlessly over moguls, knees bent, poles back. It made him feel free. "My mom, she was always encouraging me to just be normal like everyone else," Steve recalls. "She didn't put any limits on me. I was normal in every other way. This was just the way I turned out."

When Steve was 13, the family was driv-ing home from a day of skiing, tired and happy in their big eight-cylinder Mercury, when it began to snow heavily. "The wind was blowing snow over the road," Steve recalls. "My dad was driving. There was a car ahead of us in the same lane. We couldn't see it until it was too late. At the last minute, he saw the car and swerved to avoid it. There was a car coming in the other direction. We hit head-on."

Steve's father was killed instantly. His mother's back was broken. She was hospitalized for several months.

In Steve's memories of that time, grief melds with physical agony. In the year following his father's death, Steve underwent a series of reconstructive surgeries on his face. He spent more than four months in the hospital. The radiation he'd received as a toddler had left Steve unable to open his mouth wide enough to receive even routine dental care. A Toronto dentist wanted to pull all of his teeth. Instead, Steve's mother and his doctor opted for surgery. Surgeons removed sections of bone from Steve's ribs and grafted them to his jaw. To hold Steve's refashioned jaw in place temporarily, doctors wired it to a circular metal frame they fitted over the top of his head like a halo.

There were complications. "They ended up doing a skin graft from my shoulder to my face," Steve recalls. "That was bad. It was very painful. They had me all doped up. They had me in isolation because they didn't want me to get infected."

Steve recounts these details reluctantly and only when asked. "I don't want people to feel sorry for me," he says matter-of-factly.

There is only one detail of his ordeal that Steve volunteers: His mother, a widow with three other grieving children to tend at home, took the train into Toronto daily to visit him in the hospital. "My mom," he says, "deserves credit for being an angel."

Steve was resilient. By high school, he was such a strong skier that he joined the Canadian Ski Patrol, a volunteer group that provides first aid to injured skiers. Steve and three buddies from school formed a first-aid team and won several competitions.

Steve was smart, a perpetual A student. Yet he came to realize that some people looked at his face and assumed he was stupid. "If I'm at a restaurant with someone, the waitress will ask the other person what I want to order," he says. That's tough to take, he says, but not as tough as the rare lout who looks at his face and laughs.

In college, Steve studied engineering, as his late father had. For the first time, he moved away from his supportive family. He lived in a group residential hall. He skied and played squash. Driven to succeed, he studied too much, socialized too little, and maintained excellent grades at the price of not having much fun, he recalls. "I tried to be the perfect person, to know everything and always be the smartest guy in the room," he says. "My insecurity came from how people looked at me, not how I looked at myself. We are all vulnerable to how other people communicate our value to us . . . I became a perfectionist because I figured that would make other people accept me."

In 1988, Steve moved to Northern Virginia for work. Eventually, he was living and working out of his Herndon townhouse. He communicated with colleagues and clients primarily by e-mail or phone. As a single telecommuter in anonymous suburbia it was easy to feel isolated.

"I just coasted along, not thinking there was too much meaning in life," he recalls. "Basically, I was just working, eating, watching TV and sleeping. That was about it."

He tried not to ponder what life might have been like with a different face. "Not knowing anything I could do about it, I didn't dwell on it," he says. "That's just the way it was. That's just the way that life is."

Steve experienced a spiritual awakening. His new faith, he recalls, inspired him to see himself through his maker's eyes. "Instead of trying harder to get other people to accept me, I understood that God already accepted me the way I was," he says. Christian theology gave him an intellectual framework for understanding and transcending his own suffering. This passage from Galatians 2:20 sums it up, Steve says: "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ living in me: and that which I now live in the flesh I live in the faith . . ."

Yet Steve, man of faith, was still a man -- corporeal and lonely. Once, at a church singles social, Steve watched a couple do something that mesmerized him. They were swing dancing.

Determined to learn how, Steve drove to Glen Echo one Saturday night in the late '90s, parked his car and sat. He was trying to work up the nerve to go inside for the free lesson routinely offered before Saturday night dances.

"Being single is kind of tough and lonely," he says. "I was trying to get involved somewhere. This looked like it would be a good thing to get involved with. At the same time, I was there all by myself. It was pretty nerve-racking to go in there, to go someplace you've never been before, not knowing who is going to be in there or what it is going to be like. I just remember sitting in the car in the parking lot and praying to God to help me through it."

When Steve entered the ballroom, it was empty. In his anxiety, he'd arrived early. He stayed for the class, then spent the rest of the evening watching other people dance. The next week, he returned. He kept returning. He signed up for one series of lessons, then another. He struggled to master the steps. Like any novice dancer, he also struggled to find the courage to make himself vulnerable by asking a stranger to dance; to not be crushed when rejected.

Steve kept dancing. He became proficient in a wide range of swing-dancing styles and steps, and gained a reputation as a confident leader who could make his partners, whether beginners or experts, dance their best. He became such a fixture on the region's swing-dancing circuit that fellow dancers took more notice of his moves than his face. "I think of myself as normal," Steve says. "If I'm somewhere people aren't used to me, I'm different enough that they look at me. It's nice to be in a place where I'm treated just like everyone else . . .

"All people have the same issues to deal with. If you think God is in control of everything, and things don't work out how you want, you have to wonder, am I going to be permanently angry with God? I had to learn to forgive God. I had to learn to forgive myself for not being perfect, and then try to forgive other people. At a dance, when you go up to ask somebody to dance, and they say no, that's pretty hard to deal with . . .

"My philosophy is that nothing is ever perfect. No matter how good a dancer you are, no dance is ever perfect. You are going to make mistakes. Your dance partners are going to make mistakes. So the best thing to do is practice how to recover. When you get distracted or miss a step, you don't want to stop there. The thing to do is keep dancing so no one even knows."

When the Eight Week Wonders were formed, Steve didn't join the team right away because he didn't have a regular dance partner. Steve thought he'd lined up a dance partner, but at the first rehearsal the woman he'd thought had agreed to dance with him was partnered with another man. "She was very apologetic," Steve recalls. "I don't know what really happened, if she didn't understand what I was asking her or what. So I'm standing there without a partner . . . In that first class they separated the class into the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots, the people without a partner, just circulated among themselves." He didn't go back for a while after that.

Eventually, Steve joined a different dance team with a woman he'd met at a dance class. "Her focus was on perfecting the moves," Steve says. "My focus was on having a good time and getting to know her. She wanted me to perfect the moves. I wanted her to be my friend."

The collaboration didn't last. In 2003, Steve joined the Eight Week Wonders. He tried a succession of dance partners but none of them worked out. So he was without a partner once more.

Last February, Steve was dancing at the Chevy Chase Ballroom in the District one night when he saw F.G. and asked her to dance. F.G. had been taking swing-dancing lessons for only a couple of months, but Steve could tell right away that she was a natural. He felt like a talent scout who'd made an astounding discovery.

F.G. recalls being nervous as she accepted Steve's outstretched hand for that first dance. "I had seen him on the dance floor," she says. "I was flattered and excited, and a little worried that I wouldn't be able to keep up. Of course I wondered about the face, just wondered in that human way what had happened. I was concerned about not being able to understand him when he spoke. But I got used to that pretty quickly. I saw that he was a great dancer. That's what I saw."

F.G. grew up in the rural Alabama town of Fort Deposit, where there was one stoplight and a population of 1,000. Everybody in town knew that F.G. danced on the high school drill team and that way back in first grade she'd been her class representative to the homecoming court. Everybody knew everybody in Fort Deposit. If the police chief spied F.G. walking home from school, he'd tell her to hop into his squad car so he could drive her. Folks in town thought nothing of giving one another a hug, a reassuring hand squeeze or a pat on the back.

"There's a lot of social lubricant there," F.G. says. So when F.G. moved to the District for work, she found it stiff, closed, aggressive-defensive and more than a little hard to take. "D.C. is so transitory," she says. "Nobody is really from here. People move fast. They don't really hug . . . You are scared to death to touch anybody because you might get sued."

Trained as a public-interest lawyer, F.G. is the director of grass-roots outreach for the National Wildlife Federation. During a party at an environmental conference, a colleague asked her to dance and led her through some swing moves. She enjoyed the experience so much that she signed up for swing-dancing lessons last January. It was part of a 2005 New Year's resolution to get out and socialize more.

"I came away from those first nights of dancing just euphoric from the music, the human contact -- body and soul -- the movement," she recalls. "It would take me a good two hours to eat and wind down so I could go to sleep."

F.G. started dancing several nights a week. "I kind of went nuts with it," she says, laughing. She'd roll into work tired at 10 a.m., work into the evening and leave the office just in time to catch a dance class or dance at 8 or 9 p.m. She hadn't kept hours like this since law school, only the library was never this much fun.

She was so happy and grateful when a skilled dancer led her through a rousing swing number that she didn't care if this was Washington, not Fort Deposit. "Sometimes I just had to hug their neck," she says.

F.G. found herself dancing through her days as well. A co-worker once caught F.G. executing a jazzy pirouette at the copy machine. "Nice spin!" F.G. recalls her saying. Waiting for elevators, standing at crosswalks waiting for the light to change or standing at her kitchen stove stirring a pot, she'd practice standing on one foot to improve her balance.

Then, she met Steve at the Chevy Chase Ballroom. After they'd danced together a few times, he asked her to be his partner in the Eight Week Wonders. She hesitated. She was just finishing Koerner and Sternberg's eight-week beginning swing course. She worried she couldn't keep up with the team. "I knew it was going to work out," Steve recalls. "I knew she knew how to follow. What she didn't know, I was good enough I could cover for her."

Turned out he didn't need to.

After one of the new dance partners' first team rehearsals, Steve asked F.G. to join him at the Silver Diner in Merrifield for a cup of coffee. "I was, like, I'm going to ask this beautiful woman to coffee," Steve recalls, "If she says no, I'm going to be crushed."

She said yes. Over coffee, Steve shyly handed F.G. an envelope. Inside he'd placed a photograph of himself as a baby. He'd wanted her to see his baby picture "because I was cute," he says simply. For the next four hours, Steve and F.G. talked. He told her about his childhood cancer. They both talked about their families, their jobs, where they'd lived, what they believed. When they stopped talking, it was close to midnight. Steve felt as if he'd found a rare soul able to see him as he was, not as he appeared. It brought to mind one of his favorite passages from a poem by William Blake:

This life's dim windows of the soul,

Distort the heavens from pole to pole,

And lead you to believe a lie,

When you see with, not through the eye.

"I felt it was a time we connected," Steve recalls. "Our souls connected. That's what I think. It had a lot to do with the fact that I felt I could trust her. I was happy to get to know her and have her know me."

Becoming friends made dancing together richer, F.G. says. Dancing became a fluent conversation between friends able to finish each other's sentences. When they weren't dancing, the partners often traded e-mails about dancing.

Steve e-mailed old movie clips with dance moves he wanted them to learn. They critiqued the previous night's dances. They compared observations on how dance is a metaphor for life and shared thoughts on why their partnership worked.

"Steve is the perfect lead," F.G. says. "He's very clear on what he wants you to do. He delivers enough force to help you get wherever he wants you to go, but not so much that it throws you off. I want to realize as accurately as possible what he's going for. I like it even better if I throw my own thing in there and surprise him. There is a little negotiation going on. But it's all good. It's spontaneous. It's creative. It's just so joyful it's hard for it to ever be bad. Each dance is something we've created together."

F.G. is the perfect partner, Steve says. "One of the objectives of the lead is to get the follower to smile," he says. "It means you are pleasing the other person. If you are dancing with someone who is looking around the room and not paying attention to what you are doing, it's, like, why are you here? I don't ever have to work too hard to get F.G. to smile. I could dance with her all night."

F.G.'s step is as light as her spirit. Sometimes, when the partners dance, Steve says, "I imagine both of us floating on a cloud up to Heaven."

In the first months of their partnership, Steve and F.G. danced together so much she had to start icing her knees some nights. She jokingly implored Steve not to feed her addiction to swing by telling her about new dance venues. "I'd say don't tell me about any more nights I could dance!" F.G. recalls, again laughing. "I'd say 'La-la-la-la-la. I'm not listening.'" When the Eight Week Wonders took photos, Steve and F.G. each mailed copies home so their moms could see the two of them together hamming it up striking dance poses in their team costumes.

"My mom has hers on the refrigerator," F.G. says.

"My mom has one on her refrigerator, too," Steve says.

On a night less than a week before the competition, with F.G. out of town on business, Steve has to dance the Virginia State Open routines with substitute partners. Leading these less familiar partners takes more effort mentally and physically. By the end of the second number, Steve is winded.

"F.G. is the best partner I know of," he says afterward. "We know each other's moves. We know how to react. We know how to recover. If she's there, I'm dancing the routine with the best person. If she's not, I'm dancing with someone else. It's not the same."

But it is something Steve will have to get used to. Not long after Steve and F.G. formed their dance partnership, F.G. began dating an experienced swing dancer. Recently, F.G. has begun learning the Eight Week Wonders' latest routine with her boyfriend as her partner. She's still going to compete in the Virginia State Open with Steve, and be his dance partner for the routines they've already learned together. They will still dance socially together several times a week. Still, not having F.G. as his partner for each of the team routines feels like a loss to Steve.

When Steve and F.G. dance together now, he says, he sometimes feels like he's Fred Astaire trying to woo Ginger Rogers.

"I'll be on the middle of the dance floor," he says. "I'll see F.G. We'll see each other. She runs up to meet me. We stand there for a while in closed position. My right arm is around her waist. And then the band starts playing. I listen to the introduction of the song. F.G. and I get connected with the rhythm. We start shifting from one foot to the other, just getting in the rhythm.

"I just zone out," he says. "It's just she and I on the dance floor . . . We both understand where we are. I want romance, and she doesn't. She's, like, Okay, we'll be friends and that's fine. I'm, like, Oh, let's have romance. That gets into the dance a little bit. It is like Fred and Ginger, how Fred is trying to bring this girl over to his side. I don't ever want to be disrespectful of her, but it is kind of a fantasy thing. So I'm watching her to see if she makes eye contact. I keep watching her face to see how she's reacting. If she figures out I'm feeling too romantic, she puts her finger up in the air and does a funny little shake to her finger. She does that just to break any romantic notions I have. I can tell. That's the kind of thing she does. She just tries to make it fun. It's her way of telling me, 'It's okay, I understand what you are doing, and we have to look at this as fun, don't we?'

"But at some point, a dance could get a little boring if you are not going to be romantic about it. So I'll lean over, and in her ear I'll say, 'Okay, you are Ginger and I am Fred.' She'll laugh. I'll try to ham it up a bit more. I'll imagine that I am Fred Astaire doing all these wild fox-trot moves I see Fred do in the movies. Fred always has his arms stretched out wide. It's kind of like an eagle I guess. He has his arms outstretched in a semicircle arrangement so that Ginger feels like she's in the arms of her partner and she's safe."

"Everybody in!" Koerner says. "Everybody in." In a corner of the ballroom at the Dulles Hilton hotel on a mid-November afternoon, Koerner and Sternberg stand at the center of a tightly packed circle of Wonders. More than 30 people, dressed in sailor suits and suspenders, strain and stretch to reach into the center of the circle and touch hands. "Go, team!" Koerner says as the dancers touch their gathered hands, then fall back and await their turn to perform.

There are five entries in the swing team-dancing category of the 2005 Virginia State Open. The Wonders, shameless, have entered twice. They'll perform one routine as the Eight Week Wonders and a second one as Son of Eight Week Wonders, a ploy, Koerner cracks, that positions them well to capture fourth and fifth place.

The Wonders trot onto the dance floor and form two parallel lines facing the judges. As they await the musical cue to launch their first routine, the dancing lawyers and salesmen, scientists and bureaucrats look as thrilled and nervous as high school thespians on opening night. F.G.'s hands feel like ice.

The competition stage is almost as unadorned as their usual practice room, with just one strand of glittery fringe strung against a back wall lined with four fake potted trees. As the Wonders skillfully execute the moves they've practiced so many Sunday nights, the crowd hoots and hollers approval.

The Wonders form a broad circle and begin a kick-stepping Charleston pattern to move from one partner to another. Morra kicks so enthusiastically he knocks over a potted tree. But the crowd is cheering so loudly for the local team that the tree falls silently, and the other Wonders don't miss a beat.

Near the end of the routine, Steve spots dancers he knows grinning in the audience, and he gets distracted. He starts to lead F.G. into a maneuver from a different routine. Sensing his error, F.G. gently places her hand over Steve's and moves it to the correct position on her hip. For once, it is Steve who instantly responds to his partner's lead. He's grateful and proud of her.

When the music stops, the Wonders file off winded and happy. "It lifts my heart," says Schwartz, the court administrator from Bowie.

The Wonders' next routine doesn't go nearly as well, but none of them seem to care. Most of the Wonders don't stick around to hear the judges announce that the team placed third and fifth.

"I defy anyone to tell me who won the contest last year without first checking the Internet," Frank Morra cracks as most of the Wonders head off to a nearby restaurant to celebrate a team member's birthday. "It's very transitory information."

Steve and F.G. stay behind for the open dancing. They are both still keyed up from the rush of the competition. They want to dance, just the two of them, to unwind like sprinters who've crossed the finish line and need to walk to cool down. Steve offers his hand, F.G. takes it, and he leads her onto the dance floor for a mid-tempo number. As they dance, Steve gets a leg cramp. F.G., worried, wants to know if he needs to sit down.

"No," he recalls telling her. "I'll be all right. I just want to keep dancing."

One week after the competition, F.G. sends Steve an e-mail with the subject line: "bam." She's been offered a job as director of the National Wildlife Federation's regional office in Atlanta. She hadn't sought the move, but will consider it, she writes in her message. Moving to Atlanta would put her within driving distance of her Southern relatives.

Steve tries to send an encouraging reply but admits he is at a loss for words. The next morning, he e-mails F.G. again: "This year, one thing I am so thankful for is you, and your friendship and your kindness . . . Y'know when I read 'Atlanta' . . . I realized how deeply I would miss you. Always, I have to keep reminding myself that God is in control, and He's my source of all that I need. Okay, enough pondering . . . You always have a place in my prayers."

"I didn't want to do this over e-mail, but don't want to tell you at a dance either, and don't want you to hear it from anyone else," F.G. writes to Steve on December 8. "I've accepted the Atlanta job: We can talk about it later. I've been crying all morning, but that will pass."

"Strange," Steve writes back, "but I felt a strong sad feeling in my heart earlier this morning."

Six days later the Wonders perform at an employee holiday party for Exxon Mobil at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner. F.G. tries joking that her colleagues at the Wildlife Federation would "skin her alive" if they knew she was dancing for the Exxon Mobil executives. But neither she nor Steve feels much like laughing. They figure this will be their last official performance as partners on the dance team. After the team dances, Steve and F.G. look for a quiet spot to sit. The mall adjacent to the hotel is closed and desolate. They sit on a bench there for what they will later describe as a wrenching farewell. "It's hard to separate," Steve says. "Hard to close that chapter."

Sitting in the desolate mall, Steve presents F.G. with a Christmas present: a framed photo of them dancing. The photo records a fleeting moment of triumph. Steve holds F.G. aloft. The dance partners beam. Steve placed the photo in a frame emblazoned: "A true friend is one of life's greatest gifts."

On a cold December night, red and green Christmas lights are strung around the Chevy Chase Ballroom. Along one wall, would-be dancers sit on benches and folding chairs. They are waiting to ask someone to dance or be asked. They are waiting for their next chance at the romance of a well-executed dance.

Steve is in a familiar position, looking for a new dance partner. He jokes, glumly, about posting a notice that he's holding auditions.

Some of the tunes the deejay spins are seasonal and lighthearted, but Steve looks stony as he steers one thick-waisted woman around the dance floor. The woman is perfectly proficient in all the expected steps. But she's no Ginger Rogers -- and she's no F.G. She's a mere mortal. When she dances, her feet touch the ground.

Steve is struggling, he later says. He's an emotional wreck from saying goodbye to F.G. just a few days before. Yet he keeps on dancing. All around him, other dancers swivel, kick, jump and swirl. Clasped hands lift together. Arms arc. Linked by light touches and the rhythm of the music, men and women move together and apart, together and apart.

In one of the last songs of the evening, Steve can be glimpsed deftly leading a young woman through the happy throng of dancers. The woman, who wears her light brown hair in a ponytail, moves well. She and Steve move well together. As the song ends, Steve grasps the woman in his arms and dips her backward, ever-so-briefly, in the classic finale to the three-minute romance of a dance. They both smile.

April Witt is a Magazine staff writer. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.