Shag Dancing, Satire, and Stories
There was never a shortage of verbal storying or conversation in my childhood home. In large part, that was due to the circumstance of living in a small house on the south side of Daufuskie Island in the late ‘90s. Back then, anything beyond rudimentary TV stations on Daufuskie came by way of satellites that offered spotty projections on the best of days. When the thunder clouds barreled across the spartina grass from Savannah, the satellite picture turned to glitched hieroglyphics, that is, until the power inevitably went out completely. The internet wasn’t something we knew or cared about. So, we talked. Well, my father did mostly. He was an author and a storyteller, and he used my siblings and me as practice audiences.
My father, Bo Bryan, was the son of a lawyer and real estate developer. He grew up in Myrtle Beach in the 1950s and 1960s. Like many baby boomers and members of the so-called hippy generation, my father decided he was not going to follow in his father’s footsteps, or anyone else’s for that matter. To add his own color to the paradox of the time, my father, who was dyslexic and considered himself illiterate, became a student of literature with ambitions of becoming a writer. Bo got his first taste of creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1971, where several creative writing teachers allowed him to audit classes. For the next 20 years, he sailed boats, chased girls, and dedicated himself to reading, expanding his vocabulary, learning sentence structure by trial and error, gaining a feel for the architecture of paragraphs, and finally realizing stories of his own.
Shortly after I was born, he published a novel, “Bitsy Nickle Might Have AIDS.” The book was controversial, inundated with political satire and dark comedy aimed at the heterosexual transmission of HIV in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. The book fortuitously and comically foretold Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. In the wake of the novel’s release, Bo traveled around the Bible belt to speak at college campuses. In addition to admonishing America’s youth about the practice of safe sex, he challenged local politicians to lead by example and be tested for AIDS. As you might imagine, he did not curry favors or make many friends in political circles.
In 1995, my dad published “SHAG, The Legendary Dance of the South.” The “Shag Book” tells the story of the first social dance to emerge alongside the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll music. If you were young and living on the Grand Strand in the 1950s and 1960s, knowing how to shag dance was paramount to your popularity. The shag was the break-dancing of its day. My dad was, admittedly, not a rug-cutting shagger. As he might say: “Being a good shag dancer or an ace on a pool table is just another sign of a misspent youth.” Nonetheless, Bo spent enough time in juke joints and beach bars in his teens and early 20s to earn a Ph.D. in bar stool psychiatry. But during those years, he also became intimately familiar with the shag dance, was mesmerized by it, and more than capable of accurately capturing its essence in prose. Today, the shag is recognized as the state dance by both North and South Carolina. The “Shag Book” still sells copies, and my father still attends book signings and speaking engagements with the SOS crowd in North Myrtle Beach.
In the late 1990s, my father took a step back from seeking publishers to devote his time and energy to raising us kids as a single father, but he continued to write. I can still hear the sound of his keyboard clicking at all hours of the day and night throughout the shotgun house we lived in on Daufuskie. Over the last 30 years, he has engaged in extensive journalistic endeavors for various charities, written internet copy and articles for magazines and local newspapers, and amassed a trove of unpublished novels and short stories. Today, at 75 years old, he is Myrtle Beach’s first poet laureate and continues to write daily. I would be remiss if I did not admit that’s not too bad for a dyslexic hippy.