Perspiration dribbling down my wrist, I would clutch the poor thing's hand as her palms slipped and slithered across mine, the conversational void filled only by occasional gasps of pain as her toes were crushed beneath my shoes.

When I left school, having crippled half the senior class whose fate it was to be dance fodder for my high school, I still couldn't dance.

Social mores, however, dictated that the easiest way to chat up a female was to dance with her so I would venture forth, feet, hips and arms moving to a rhythm heard only by me and bearing no relationship to that pulsing from the speakers. By then I had discovered alcohol, the dud dancer's friend, and realised to my delight that when consumed in sufficient quantity, beer could delude you into believing you could dance.

The art lay in computing how much was needed to achieve the desired degree of delusion. Imbibe too freely and your chemically induced confidence could cause you to go careering across the dance floor like an elephant on skates, while erring on the side of sobriety would condemn you to a dancing style that resembled a man trying to dodge dog droppings on the footpath. It was a fine like we walked, many of my friends regularly miscalculating the degree of liquid courage required and crumpling slowly to the floor as the band played on.

These were the memories that flashed through my mind last week when I turned up at a function at the Sofitel Brisbane promoting the Saturday Night Fever musical. I remembered seeing the movie, watching John Travolta whirling across the dance floor in his white suit and praying that he would fall over and break both his legs. If you could dance like that, my friends and I concluded, you could have any woman in the world.

At one point, I even contemplated buying a white suit. Saner minds pointed out that given my intemperate ways, it would not stay white for more than five minutes and that if I wore one, I would look more like an ice cream salesman than a disco sex symbol.

   "You're all jealous," I muttered to my friends.
   "Of what?" they chorused, and I was forced to concede that they had a point.

The only dance at which I ever excelled was that all-time favourite The Stomp, which required you to stnd in the one spot, stomping your left leg on the ground and then your right. I became an accomplished stomper but then it was told never to do it again and was forced to return to my spider-on-valium dancing style.

"Bastards," I would growl as I watched some snake-hipped male flowing across the dance floor while my wildly flailing arms gouged another eye from its socket and the familiar crunch of fractured toes and groans of agony could be heard over the music.

So I walked into the hotel and watched the dancers gyrating to the Bee Gees and their '70s Night Fever sound track. I was about to start miming the words when a collective moan rose from the group of women beside whom I was standing. Had they thought I was about to start singing and were voicing their horror at the prospect? Then I realised that, somehow, my jacket had clipped the side of a full glass of wine on the table beside me and tipped the contents into a woman's handbag.

"Sorry," I said, reaching for a wad of paper napkins and dabbing at the bag, inside of which were new floating several lipsticks, a mobile phone and assorted bank notes. My efforts at flood mitigation were misinterpreted as an attempt to make a grab for the cash and I muttered another "sorry" as the woman grabbed her bag and hoisted a dripping mobile phone from within. It seemed an appropriate point at which to decamp so I slid behind a column and disappeared into the crowd.

I was toe-tapping by now, a worrying development as it was usually a portent of an assault on the dance floor. I estimated that I was still one glass of beer short of dancing so I lassoed a passing waiter, hosed down an ale and moved on to the floor, people edging out of my way and wondering what beat it was to which I moved.

It was quite a night as I gyrated around the room, sweating and panting in the grip of Saturday night fever. A friend called the next day and said she had overheard a group of women at the function talking about me.

"Look at that weirdo," they had hissed. "That's a beautiful girl he's dancing with but she's far too pretty for him. How the hell did he get a girl like that! What does he think he's doing? It's disgraceful. That poor, poor woman."