Lucy Vickery

Redoing the hokey-cokey

issue 10 August 2019

In Competition No. 3110 you were invited to provide a version of the hokey-cokey filtered through the pen of a well-known writer.
 
Thanks to George Simmers and C. Paul Evans, I now know that doing the hokey–cokey — said by some to have been composed by Puritans in the 18th century to mock the Catholic mass — could constitute a hate crime. Mr Evans weaved this into his amusing take on Kipling’s ‘If’. Equally enjoyable were reworkings by D.A. Prince, David Silver-man and John O’Byrne of Henry Reed’s ‘Naming of Parts’ (‘Today we have shaking of parts…’) and Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of My Self–Humiliation’, courtesy of Mark McDonnell. There was so much to admire. How I hummed and hawed before settling on the six below, who earn £25 each.
 


Out on the dance-floor, the clock at ten-twenty,
We dance to a rag-time, or is it a waltz?
My feet are flirtatious, but no cognoscenti,
And I lose the first set, scoring two double faults.


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