It began with a telephone call and a song request. It became a love that lasted a lifetime.
A young radio announcer in Galveston answers a call from Alice, a dancer with a voice he can’t quite forget. What follows is a relationship that changes them both, survives distance, marriages, and the passing years—and leaves behind memories neither time nor circumstance can erase.
Lucy Asks George
The story behind the story.
Lucy: George, this entire story begins with something incredibly ordinary—a woman calling a radio station one afternoon to request a song. What was it about that idea that made you think there was an entire book hiding inside one telephone call?
George: It was one phone call, one request, out of probably thousands that I fielded over my years on the air, and for some reason that one stayed with me for life.
Like many of my stories, there’s an event or a person at the center of it. Maybe you knew them for one day or one week, but somehow that encounter had ramifications that lasted for the rest of your life.
And I think most people, if they stop and consider their own lives—the people they’ve met, the things that have happened to them—can probably identify moments like that. Something that seemed ordinary at the time, but years later you realize it changed something.
Lucy: Before you met Alice, you knew her only as a voice on the telephone, but you were intrigued because she didn’t sound like some of the women you’d previously known from playing records in establishments like that. What happened when the woman you’d imagined finally became a real person sitting across from you?
George: I don’t think I wished for her to turn my assumptions upside down. I did want to meet her. She didn’t sound like others I’d previously known from playing records in establishments like that, so that was intriguing to me.
What Alice did, entirely on her own, over pie and coffee, was turn those assumptions and preconceived notions upside down.
Lucy: The title comes from a very particular memory—Alice dancing in the moonlight in front of your apartment window. Why did that image, out of all the memories you had of her, become the image that represented the whole story to you?
George: Well, Lucy, as the old saying goes, “You had to be there.” [chuckles]
My bedroom overlooked the Gulf in Galveston. That night was bright and moonlit. The moon had risen later, maybe sometime after midnight, and the moonbeams crossed all that water almost to my bedroom window.
The room was dark except for that lunar light, so the memory is as much about the mood of the moment as it is about the dance itself.
For many years, it was the most intimate moment I’d ever experienced.
Read Chapter One
The Phone Call
On an island far from here in memory if not distance, I once knew a girl who danced on a pole.
It started innocently enough; she called the radio station one afternoon to request a song. I was on the air afternoons from 3 PM until 7 PM, a time slot known as “afternoon drive.” It was a high-energy period, as listeners were finishing their school or workdays and rushing to drive home, go grocery shopping, grab drive-through burgers, or head to the bars.
But due to the nature of her work, this caller was just waking up and starting her day, with a breakfast of toast and scrambled eggs with bacon. Feeling lonely, she called the station to make her request.
“What song would you like to hear?” I asked after she’d told me her name and what she did for a living, and how she was just beginning her day. She didn’t know and asked that I pick a nice one for her.
As we talked, my mind sifted through hundreds of song titles before settling on one from Bob Seger’s Night Moves—a quiet, moody track called “Mainstreet.” Not one of the album’s big hits, but a perfect tone-setter.
Before we hung up, I told her the first song after the next set of commercials was just for her and queued it up. It was what I told all the callers when we were able to play their requests: the song was just for them.
A couple of days later she phoned again; I recognized her voice at once. It was kind of low and husky. It had a way of settling into my ear like a warm whisper, especially when she’d just woken up.
“How are you today?” she began. “I was wondering if I could ask for a little tiny favor. Would you play my song again? It really made my day when you did it for me the last time.”
“Well, sure, I might be able to squeeze it in here in a few minutes.”
And we chatted for about five minutes. It wasn’t my practice to stay on the phone more than a few seconds—maybe a minute at most—with callers, because there was an incredible amount to think about and physically do when performing a live radio program.
As a rule, one cannot let oneself become distracted by one person, while ignoring the thousands that are listening.
But the sound of her voice had set a hook in my ear. And like a fish taking bait from the anglers on the jetties off the beach outside the station windows, I was being reeled into something, though I didn’t yet know what.
A year before this, while in college, I worked in a topless bar in Houston. It was on Westheimer. The Boobie Rock.
Their claim to fame was that they invented “couch dancing.” All I know is the couches were there when I arrived, and still there when I left. One of my duties, in addition to playing the records over a booming sound system, was to inspect each girl prior to her taking the stage to ensure her nipples were covered with the little round Band-Aids. Seemed silly then and now, but due to local law, a woman couldn’t be completely topless in public. The little Band-Aids were considered by law to be clothing.
But the experience taught me more than that. I knew the stripper game. I’d made several friends who were dancers. But a serious—or even physical—relationship with one just wasn’t in me.
They just weren’t my type. While I considered myself something of an adventurer, a man about town, a party person, some of these ladies were well past good behavior and the societal norms of the day. Not only in their recreational drug and alcohol use, but just downright wild and uncontrolled. In short, they sometimes frightened me.
But this woman on the phone, a year younger than me, had aurally cast me under her spell. Before we hung up, I did something I never did before—or since: I gave her my home number and told her I was usually back at the apartment by 8 PM or so.
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She Danced in the Window is available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.