"Asking my mom to dance like she did in the '80s" is a recent TikTok trend, but unlike other participants, Courteney Cox didn't stick to Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy." In a video posted on TikTok and Instagram, she starts off dancing to the synth-pop song. As the music changes to Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark," she takes off her hoodie to reveal the shirt she wore in the 1984 music video and dances like she did onstage with Springsteen long before she starred in Friends, reports Deadline.
Cox, then 20 years old, was selected over professional dancers in a casting call for the video, which shows her being pulled from the crowd at a concert in St. Paul, Minnesota, to dance with Springsteen. At the time, her only acting credits were a commercial and an episode of As the World Turns, reports USA Today. In interviews decades later, she said the video "got me in the door to so many places," though she was "very nervous" at the time and is a "little embarrassed" about it.
The TikTok trend has seen overwhelmingly positive responses to videos of Gen X parents re-creating the dances of the '80s. The New York Times describes the videos as "a portal to another era: when dance was more often improvisational and spontaneous, when people felt the beat and found the rhythm organically, moving without the constraints of a vertical aspect ratio." (More Courteney Cox stories.)
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