You make me feel like dancing

Remember the song "Save the Last Dance for Me," and how the man tells the woman to go ahead and dance as long as they leave together at the end of the night? A huge Drifters' hit in the 1960s, it's been picked up by Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and others -- and you'll probably be singing it in the shower now that I've mentioned it.

It's a romantic snapshot. She dances. He watches. And when the music's over, they put their arms around each other and go home.

Anthony Tusler likes to tell the backstory: The songwriter was Doc Pomus, a blues singer who had polio and used crutches and a wheelchair. His wife was a Broadway actress who liked going out on the town.

Tusler, who's been in a wheelchair since he was injured as a kid, considers the song real poetry.

"He talks about something universal that men don't usually voice. He discloses that he feels vulnerable. But the part that really gets me is how he says with complete certainty that he knows she'll go home with him. I love his confidence."

The tune is one of the stars in Tusler's music collection that includes songs that are either performed or written by people with disabilities or speak about what it's like to be disabled. He was inspired a few years ago when a disability conference in San Francisco included a dance, and he sought out appropriate music. He said he tested the songs for their dance-ability, hopping around his living room in his wheelchair.

"Hopping?" I asked.

Sure, he said, like the kind of dancing everybody does in their cars or wiggling in their seats at a concert.

Another favorite is Kenny Rogers' anti-war ballad, "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town," about a guy wrecked in Vietnam and back home worrying about his woman. Tusler and his wife were at dinner one night when someone mentioned "Ruby," and the three men at the table, all disabled, wailed the song in unison.

Tusler, who lives in Penngrove, for 22 years ran the disability resource center at Sonoma State University. But now he's all about music and what it says about the disability experience in particular and about the human condition in general.

"You can say a lot of things unmediated and uncensored in a song that might not be OK in print," said Tusler.

Think about Randy Newman's "Short People," tweaking society for its stupid prejudices. The same song could be written about skinny people, old people or green ones.

Tusler and his unique playlist (available on aboutdisability.com, his Web site) have been featured on the BBC as well as Bay Area radio shows in which he celebrates the likes of Ray Charles, Ian Dury and Doc Watson.

"Doc Watson told Terry Gross that if he hadn't been blind, he would have been an engineer. It made me think, what building could that man have ever built that would have been equal to the music he gave."

Then there's DuBose Heyward, who had polio as a child and wrote the novel "Porgy," about a disabled man. It became the basis for George Gershwin's heartbreakingly beautiful opera "Porgy and Bess," for which Heyward did the lyrics.

Tom Jones had tuberculosis, "which meant he didn't have to be a Welsh coal miner but could sing in the pubs." Neil Young had polio and epilepsy. Marilyn Manson spent a lot of time in a hospital, which gave him "the right outsider attitude" to do the song "Beautiful People."

One more: Ice Cube's "Ghetto Vet," a song about a paralyzed gang fighter. It was the first time Tusler, who's personally more of a jazz funk guy, appreciated rap music.

"The rhyming, the images, his use of words. I finally got it."

You can e-mail Susan Swartz at susan.swartz@pressdemocrat.com.