It's a one-flight walk-up in an 80-year-old building, just as it should be. You wouldn't put a ballroom on the ground floor.
Climb the narrow stairway on the old school carpeting, and you're going back in time, back to moments that weren't all that great but which have been redefined by the passage of time to make them so.
Back to Friday or Saturday nights in the 1930s and '40s, when one of the few escapes from painful realities of everyday life was to go dancing.
Back then, you didn't hit the singles bars to meet people or forget your troubles. You headed for ballrooms. They were oases.
Dennis Lyle appreciates that, even if it's true that he got into the ballroom dancing business 30 years ago because of all the pretty girls. Looking at his first crop of students -- none younger than 60 -- he planned on a short career. They were of the generation who'd come of age in the era of elegant ballrooms and listened to radio broadcasts from the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, picturing themselves dancing under the stars that the lighting was meant to simulate.
"I thought, this is a cool business," Lyle says, "but it's not going to be around a long time, because these people who know what it stood for were going to pass away and it was going to be a lost art form."
Never underestimate the power of the mambo.
Lyle, 50, now believes ballroom dancing will never die. Fueled in recent years by TV's "Dancing With the Stars," ballroom dancing is back in vogue. Lyle saw the same burst in the late 1970s when "Saturday Night Fever" got people dancing with partners again.
Lyle owns the Imperial Ballroom, which occupies the top two floors of the historical three-story Williams Building in downtown Fullerton. Nestled in the historically protected building, the ballroom seems even further removed from the hubbub of modern life, a mere one floor above street level.
On Wednesday morning, about a dozen people were going through their paces, sometimes alone in ballet-like movements, sometimes with a partner and sometimes with a dance instructor.
"In a lot of ways the industry of ballroom dancing has evolved tremendously," Lyle says, "but at the same time it hasn't. It's still gentlemen opening doors for ladies. It's elegant. When we go out, we wear tuxedos. We dress up for everything we do. There's that elegance about ballroom dancing that Fred Astaire epitomized. We're all part of that."
