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nights, so it’s hard for me to get out,” he said. “This is just the right thing for me.”
    Actually, it’s iust the right thing for everybody. This is not
the first time I’ve danced in the middle of the day on Friday. When I was a little girl, in something like the equivalent of kindergarten, in the Caribbean, every Friday we got a longer recess period than on the other days of the week. Then some of us would gather at one end of the schoolyard, grab each other around the waist, and start dancing up and down while we chanted, “Tee la la la, congo. Tee la la la, congo.” We didn’t know what it meant, but we would chant it over and over again until the end of the recess. I liked Fridays just for that. It was the one time I was free to be sweaty and have fun. I also liked it because, according to my teacher, Mrs. Tanner, a very fat lady, whom we called Muddy Bottom Tanner behind her back, our behavior was becoming only to savages. How I did want to be a little savage! I bet they never had to take cod-liver oil every day, or eat porridge in the mornings, or wear cotton anklets when all the other girls were wearing nylon anklets. And, after not having to do any of that, they probably got to “Tee la la la” every day for as long as they liked. Mrs. Tanner would not understand or approve of lunchtime dancing at La Martinique.
    â€” January 6, 1975

The Magic Is Blue
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    Recently, we saw Blue Magic, the black five-man vocal group from Philadelphia, perform at the Felt Forum, and they were so incredibly good that they revived for us the word “copacetic.” Not many things ever get to be copacetic these days. A truly outstanding thing might be called “cool” or “right on” or “solid” or “together,” but very rarely is it outstanding enough to be called copacetic. Blue Magic, though, is outstanding enough to be called that. Blue Magic is the promise of The Temptations (who could be called “cool” or “right on” or “solid” or “together”) fulfilled.
    Blue Magic performing: Five peanut-brown men onstage, wearing identical sky-blue, formally tailored suits, white shoes, white bowlers, and singing, in the sweetest harmony possible, love songs. The lead singer has a choirboy tenor voice, and one of his tricks is to hold a note until he gets at least three standing ovations. A couple of times at the Felt Forum, he got five. But the real thrill in seeing Blue Magic is the
way they dance. Every set of movements seems to culminate in pirouettes. Sometimes they pirouette while standing up straight, sometimes while leaning backward, sometimes while leaning forward, sometimes with hands on hips, sometimes with arms outstretched, sometimes while appearing to curtsey. It is at once graceful and dazzling. At the end of the performance, they disappear in a big cloud of blue smoke. Just like that.
    A few days after seeing them at the Felt Forum, we saw them in the bar at the Dorset Hotel, on West Fifty-fourth Street, and they were having refreshments. They introduced themselves: Ted Mills (the lead singer), Vernon Sawyer, or Y.M.P., short for Young Mr. Plush (the group’s clothes designer). Wendell Sawyer (Vernon’s brother and the group’s vocal arranger), Keith Beaton (the group’s choreographer), and Richard Pratt. They were all wearing neatly tailored suits made of natural-looking fibre, and they all wore tons of expensive-looking jewelry around their necks and on their fingers.
    We asked them how old they were, and Ted said that none of them was younger than twenty-three or older than twenty-six.
    We asked Keith how he went about his choreography, and he said, “Well, I figure it out mathematically, and we all have good memories. Like one song might have fifty to seventy-five different steps, and we will have to do twenty-five of them before Ted sings the first note. Sometimes, while