Fats Domino lost and found in New Orleans; he was the first rock 'n roll I ever heard

Let me tell you a sweet tale to savor before you go back to choke in angst on Katrina -- an event that brought Fats Domino to mind because he went missing in New Orleans for two days before being found yesterday.

When I first heard rock 'n roll, it came at me as six records:
Fats Domino's Blue Monday, Ain't That a Shame, Walking to New Orleans, Blueberry Hill, I'm Walking, and Let the Four Winds Blow.
Plus Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock, Hound Dog, Teddy Bear, Hearthbreak Hotel, Don't be Cruel, and Love me Tender.
Six breakable shellac 78"s. Platters, they called them then -- not discs.

A strange music it was, newly aborning. Strange because you didn't just listen to it -- it had a propulsive beat that moved you to dance, too, with more vigor than anyone had ever danced before.

How we get introduced to rock 'n roll -- that's a key event in all our lives. How did it happen to you?

In my life it came as a total revolution, a radical new thing. With a very practical meaning: I had to learn to dance to it. That led to meeting girls, to dance with them.

Before those records, the only song we had in our family house was an ancient 78 by Frank Sinatra, No Orchids for my Lady. This one song was the entire extent of my Lawrence Welk pre-rock world.

Fats and Elvis inspired a neighborhood girl called Corlee, the older sister of one of my male friends, to do something that would shift our lives into a social mode. She got a small bunch of us over at her house to teach us how to dance to Fats and Elvis -- a group consisting of her younger brother, me, and a mutual friend (the boys); and her younger sister and two of this sister's friends (the girls).

Dancing gave you an opportunity to actually touch a girl. In certain steps, you got to actually hold the girl's hand.

After three lessons, Corlee gave a party. My first teenage party with girls. A new world. Heretofore unexplored possibilities. Our version of on-line dating, I guess.

The connecting link wasn't the Net. It was my friend, a handy guy to know, because he had a sister who knew girls.

That's how us boys met girls for the first time. Of course, that's also how those girls met us boys.

I now realize that, most probably, the girls thought the whole thing up. Good heavens: the girls were hitting on us! Never figured that out before. How daring -- this was long before it became OK for a girl by herself to ask out a likely lad.

I remember the unnerving presence of the girls at the party. I'd never met such creatures before. A new species on earth.

It was that weird. You see, I went to a boys-only high school. Never even SAW girls. I grew up in total social isolation from girls, like a Muslim boy in Saudi-Arabia.

Fats Domino lured me out of this state. Odd, he was a black man. This was in apartheid South Africa, where I grew up. His picture on the record covers was an alien intrusion into our white world. That square Odd-Job face with its surprising flat-top haircut dared to smile at us in cocky confidence. A black man from America was changing our young white lives. The power of American culture, colonizing us for our own good.

Fats was my first innocent introduction to rock 'n roll; my first innocent introduction to girls: an innocence that would later change to darkness and rebellion, when sex and drugs joined rock 'n roll.

Fats played his infectious piano and sang his appealing vocal -- flat, nasal, relaxed, squeaky-mellow. Us youngsters listened, enthralled.

The beat was deeply rock-steady; you had to dance. So us boys danced with the girls. And dancing, we held out our hands, and the girls took our hands.

Oh, such innocence! Innocent hand-grasping that years later would speed towards a more intimate touching.

Each boy drew his partner swinging towards him, until your eyes gave her the signal, and you suddenly snatched her much closer, the cue for both of you to lift your held hands loosely over her head so she could spin 360 degrees right next to you, after which she carommed out to arm's length, and then you caught each other at that length, held on, hands gripping hard, to pull close together again, your male body and her female body in a lively inter-gender synchronicity, a crackle of electricy bonding you across the big divide, boy-girl conjoined in a defining three-minute bubble of sweet intimacy.

All this was made possible by the voice and piano of Fats, jauntily rocking us. The first soundtrack of our young lives. The soundtrack that introduced me to the other half of our species.

Fats Domino has a big place in my heart. Sometimes a tragedy can remind you of a long-lost love, recollected not in tranquillity, but in great turmoil.

Just thought -- with all this shit coming down -- you might need a fond memory to break the prevailing grim mood.