I was just thinking about one of my favorite old movies — Shag — about a group of Southern girls who head down to Myrtle Beach for one last fling before one gets married and the others head to college. They flirt with local boys and spend a lot of time at a local dance hall. The film is set in the early sixties (filmed in 1989) and stars Phoebe Cates, Bridget Fonda, and Annabeth Gish. And while the story was fun in a coming-of-age sort of way, the thing about it that always entranced me was the “Shag”; sometimes known as the “Carolina Shag”– a uniquely southern dance that became popular in the 1930s and 1940s, a six-count swing to beach music, and believed to have originated along the strand between the Myrtle Beach resorts and beaches, all the way up to Wilmington, North Carolina.
There is a charm and gentility and sweetness to Myrtle Beach, and the shag just personifies it. In the film, it is the shag that helps one of the girls (known as “Pudge”) find romance and her confidence, and come into her own as a young woman. And while the city has grown quite a bit from the beach town portrayed in the film, for me, it still holds a bit of that old-fashioned charm and romance.
So you find yourself thinking about checking in to a Myrtle Beach resort or one of the charming little Myrtle Beach hotels, or if you’re lucky enough to snag a weekend at a friend’s beach house, be sure to ask if they know a place where you can learn to shag.
Trust me y’all, you don’t want to miss it.
***
Dating Coach and Relationship Expert Lisa Daily is the bestselling author of two dating books — Stop Getting Dumped! and How To Date Like a Grown-up; and Fifteen Minutes of Shame – a novel. Lisa is also the dating coach on DAYTIME, a nationally-syndicated morning TV show. You???ve seen her everywhere from Entertainment Tonight to the Washington Post to the HITCH movie DVD starring Will Smith.
Related Articles:
Fifteen Minutes of Shame Wins Reviewers’ Choice Award
Lisa’s Super Secret Man-Magnet Cake Recipe
Are You Crazy, or Is He Cheating?
