Cultural Knowledge Entry - "My Papa's Waltz"

1. Investigating: "My Papa's Waltz"(734).
2. My guess: I'm confused because I thought that waltz was a ballroom dance that is pretty contemporary. In the poem it is compared to the fathers intoxicated walk, but I thought that the waltz dance was a formal dance.
3. Results: The waltz is a ballroom dance, but it's triple time, meaning it's super fast. From my research I found that there are many different kinds of "Waltz" dances that arise from different countries and cultures; they all include the same basic step but with there own cultural twist. A specific kind of Waltz is called the "Hesitation Waltz" which includes many hesitations that are "basically a halt on the standing foot during the full waltz measure, with the moving foot suspended in the air or slowly dragged". This reminds me of an intoxicated person walking; dazed and stumbling slowing. (Info from freedictionary.com and wikepedia.com.)
4. Now I understand why the author uses waltz to describe the father's walking and presence. I didn't know that there was more than one kind of waltz. I'm not a dancer or have really been into different kinds of dance but I had always thought that waltz was contemporary and formal and would never describe a father who deals with alcoholism. This reference relates to the poem because of the description of what exactly the hesitation waltz is. Although a waltz can be performed formally, the message it portrays is not always that way. In this video it seems like the two are stumbling over each others love for one and another. If you pay attention to their feet and the way their bodies move along with it, I believe this is what the author is trying to describe by waltz; an unsteady movement.