The Twinkle Hesitation, attributed to S. Wallace Cortissoz, was published in Leslie Clendenen's collection, Dance Mad, in St. Louis in 1914. I'd been looking at dances in that book that incorporated twinkle steps, and this one caught my eye as fun to dance. The dance itself is a sixteen-bar, three-part sequence, but each part also makes a nifty independent addition to any hesitation waltz.
The Mistletoe Hesitation is a lovely little sixteen-bar hesitation waltz sequence originally published in F. Leslie Clendenen's Dance Mad, or the dances of the day (St. Louis, 1914), a collection of dances and dance moves borrowed liberally from other dance teachers and manuals. The Mistletoe is attributed to M.W. Cain and is one of the earliest uses I have found of a twinkle step.
Why, in fifteen-plus years of dancing ragtime socially, had I never done the eight step? It's not an obscure step; it's the first variation world-famous dance couple Vernon and Irene Castle give for the one-step and is also mentioned by them in their descriptions of the tango, half and half, and hesitation waltz. And yet somehow I'd neither danced it nor reconstructed it until late 2007 when I was looking for interesting one-step moves for some new dance students.
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