Luke has always been a fabulous dancer: those who can see "D2R" in your areas can see the Wyndham's Department store dance to "Fascination" this coming week. But whether he's dancing with Laura, Mary Mae, Lulu, waitress-Babe or Sonny Corinthos, Luke is a sweet, ball-bearings-for-hips, low-down hootchie-kootcher of a dancer. Lovehimlovehimlovehimlovehim!

TJ, who once wrote a learned post called "Dance With Me," tracing the significance of dance in the Luke/Laura paridigm.

Date: Tue, 06 May 1997
From: Tante Joan
Newgroups: rec.arts.tv.soaps.abc
Subject: GH: Repost: "Dance With Me" (was: Re: GH:Luke)

OK, Kate, just for you, the Dance post, written on the occasion of the 15th anniversary show last November:

Subject: GH: Dance With Me
From: (Tante Joan)
Date: 1996/11/17
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv.soaps.abc

What a wonderful episode the Luke and Laura Anniversary retrospective was, and how skillfully the production was mounted! Unlike so many flashback-laden anniversaries, and even the compilation L&L tapes, what made these clips so special to me was their setting against L&L present-day concerns and relationships. I cannot say enough good things about it, but I would like to comment on the dances.

It is an interesting sidelight into the Luke and Laura phenomenon that this couple, who live and thrive and raise a family in the midst of constant turmoil and danger, have as their leitmotif the dance. Like a silver thread running through their lives, Luke and Laura dance.

We saw most of these dances on Friday: the black-tie formality of the night in Wyndham's; the symbolic first dance of their wedding; the old married couple dance in the Canadian diner that brought them back to us; the anniversary waltz in the Catacombs, when Luke said, "Dance with me." The one dance we did not see of course, was the first one, the dance in the Campus Disco that began with the same words of invitation, but ended in violence on the dance floor. And that, of course, is the bit of tarnish on the gleaming silver thread.

Whatever your position on the rape/no rape debate, I challenge you to find a more complex and fascinating birth for a romantic signature theme than that first "Dance with me." And while you're pondering, ponder this: the Disco dance was not the only dance that presaged disaster: the day after their department store duet, the Left-Handed Boy brought danger and death into their lives; they danced at their wedding in the face of Helena's curse, and, of course, the coda to that sweet dance in the diner was the car bomb meant for them that killed a friend in their place.

But don't be too alarmed. When Luke and Laura danced on Friday, all I could do was cry and smile. Nothing could have been more tender, more loving, more L&L. I hope that those latecomers among you (including some of my fellow FGC Stefans and Niks) can see a bit more clearly what Luke was to so many of us then, and what he still is to Laura now.