The Hokey Pokey...

A Facebook friend reminded me of my old pastime of roller skating yesterday when she posted about her kindergarten aged son learning the Hokey Pokey for the first time.  I am sure I learned that well-known kids' dance when I was very young, but I distinctly remember doing it on roller skates at Old Mill Skating Rink in Gloucester, Virginia.

I was pretty good at roller skating.  I actually learned how to ice skate before I could roller skate, but there were no ice skating rinks in Gloucester when I moved there at age 8.  I remember I used to spend hours at the rink, skating to the hits of the late 70s and early 80s.  And then they'd do the Hokey Pokey, which was so much fun...

This isn't where I did the Hokey Pokey, but the song is the version they used when I did it in the 80s...  And the people in this video don't appear to be very good skaters.  They probably learned how to skate using roller blades.

I listened to this video earlier this morning and I swear, I now have that Hokey Pokey song stuck in my head.  I see this is the version we used... from 1953.

by Ray Anthony & His Orchestra and JoAnn Greer singing.

It's been years since I last thought about the "Hokey Pokey", although I do remember doing it with my students when I taught English in Armenia in the 1990s.  Armenian kids loved it as much as Americans did.  It was a good way to teach body parts, too.

Yet again, I am shocked at how old I am...