American Beat: Dirty Dancing

For Frank Scaturro, July 4th held such great promise. As a proud American, Scaturro gathered with family and faithfully turned on his television for a night of uplifting, patriotic entertainment on NBC's special holiday broadcast.

And then, all of a sudden, there was Beyonce Knowles doing a concert at the grave of President Ulysses S. Grant! For Scaturro, who has spent his adult life protecting the 18th president's final resting place on Manhattan's Upper West Side, this was an amazing thing. Finally, Grant's tomb was back in the public consciousness!

But then Knowles started dancing. And when I say "dancing," I don't mean dancing at all, but "thrusting," "gyrating," "bumping," "grinding" and "selling lots of Pepsi products." Suddenly, Scaturro's glass went from half-full to completely empty.

"At first, you know, I thought, 'It's nice that they're featuring the tomb because more people will know about it,' but then the more we watched, the more appalled we got," says Scaturro, president of the Grant Memorial Association. "The older people in the family were wondering how she even kept her clothing on while she was gyrating like that. For me, it was just an issue of lascivious dancing on a great man's grave."

When Frank Scaturro talks, I listen. I met him a decade ago when he was just a precocious college kid who shamed the National Park Service into properly maintaining the memorial, which was then covered in graffiti and urine. The place was so filthy that the State of Illinois even demanded that Grant's remains be re-interred in the Land of Lincoln. But Scaturro turned up the heat and today, the memorial is as grand as it ever was--a source of great pride for the now-30-year-old lawyer.

To defend that pride, Scaturro fired off letters of complaint to Interior Secretary Gale Norton and NBC. In his letters, Scaturro complained that Beyonce's "explicit performance was patently inappropriate for that location," that "organizers of any event at that location should be required to observe a certain decorum that clearly was not met by the level of explicitness in Ms. Knowles' performance" and that Knowles' gyrations constituted "lascivious choreography."