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In the past year, some 5,000 discotheques have cropped up in the U.S., and their patrons are not all Coke drinkers in chinos and stretch pants. Starting from Paris' famed Whisky a Go-Go, discotheques by more or less the same name have opened in Milwaukee, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Atlanta and Los Angeles. In addition, there is the A-Go-Go in Aspen, Colo., the Bucket A-Go-Go in Park City, Utah, the Frisky A-Go-Go in San Antonio, the Champagne A-Go-Go in Madison, Wis., and the Bin-Note A-Go-Go in Whitesboro, N.Y. And everywhere the couples go-going on the dance floor are like, well, old. Moans one teenager: "Nothing is sacred any more. I mean, we no sooner develop a new dance or something and our parents are doing it."
Manhattan now boasts 21 discotheques, where such luminaries as Rudolf Nureyev, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Truman Capote, Baby Jane Holzer, Sammy Davis Jr., ex-King Peter of Yugoslavia, Carol Channing, Peter Lawford, Tennessee Williams and Oleg Cassini mix it up with the hip twitchers. Both New York Senators—Jacob Javits and his wife Marion ("My husband and I just love to frug"), and Bobby Kennedy and Ethel ("I can't believe all that action on such a small floor")—make the discotheque scene. Jackie Kennedy, on her occasional visits to Il Mio, does a sedate version of the frug. Adlai Stevenson, the Maharani of Baroda, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor have not progressed much beyond the twist, but Walter Cronkite's variations on the frug are a wonder to behold.
Wiggiest Kick. No debutante cotillion or country-club dance is complete these days without a heavy dose of rock 'n' roll. At a charity ball on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel, some of Manhattan's highest society wiggled around the dance floor doing the mule, flapping their hands like mules' ears to the thudding beat of Lester Lanin's orchestra. "It's good for your health," says Lanin, who beefs up his society band with a rock 'n' roll trio called the Rocking Chairs.
On campus, where it once was squaresville to flip for the rock scene, it now is the wiggiest of kicks. Brenda Lee, 20, a tot-sized (4 ft. 11 in., plus five inches of hair) rockette who developed her belting delivery as a high-school cheerleader, outranks Folk Singer Joan Baez and jazz's Ella Fitzgerald on the college popularity polls. "Rock really turns everybody on," says one Princeton senior.
Swinging World. Scholarly articles probe the relationship between the Beatles and the nouvelle vague films of Jean-Luc Godard, discuss "the brio and elegance" of Dionne Warwick's singing style as a "pleasurable but complex" event to be "experienced without condescension." In chic circles, anyone damning rock 'n' roll is labeled not only square but uncultured. For inspirational purposes, such hip artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol occasionally paint while listening to rock 'n' roll music. Explains Warhol: "It makes me mindless, and I paint better." After gallery openings in Manhattan, the black-tie gatherings often adjourn to a discotheque.