Dance Sucka

Because of various dog torturings (see-picture below), newborn baby fawning, crab quiche comatosis and other various Easter blessings* we didn’t get around to the Sunday Post until late last night.

Cotillion.

There was an article in the Sunday Source about the same cotillion I attended as a rosy cheeked young man. The story has the author attempting to increase his Elfin salad fork hit points by defeating preteens in their most flustering and weakened environment. It’s all very nice as we follow along while the writer no doubt makes a blundering mistake and probably steps on somebody’s foot. I can’t say I read the article too carefully. (if you write nothing but immature and uninformed blog entries about Post articles does their Technorati feature still link back to you?) But what I did capture from the article was that it failed to address the terrifying ordeal cotillion provides when you are there as a 13-year-old and not a late 20-something trying to learn how to woo tipsy bridesmaids at your cousin’s wedding.

Take a kid at his most oafish, throw him in with dozens of other gangly lads, force him to wear an ill-fitted suit and mix in a few peach-fuzzed alpha boys and you will accurately have one side of a cotillion dance floor. Across 25 yards of DMZ sit an equal number of young ladies in confusingly various stages of female development, awaiting you to squeak out an invitation to knock knees during a stuttering version of the foxtrot. Watch as a young Americans teens wipe nervous perspiration from their hairless faces, claw at itchy collars or their older sister’s poorly altered Confirmation dresses. It was so horrible.

I tried to psyche myself up before each session, making the mental list of girls whose hands would advance my social standing; the ones with cool sisters in the higher grades and were accordingly guaranteed some degree of reflected popularity. I, of course, always ended up milling about until there were a few unpicked “safe” females, desperate for anyone to end the equally embarrassing position of not being selected at all. My only deliverances were the few Sadie Hawkins dances that left me so relieved not to have to make first move that I would have gladly danced with class’s doting old instructor. That was me sprinting out of the front door at the end of class, gasping for the cold winter air, casting aside my father’s old tie.

There were only glancing allusions to this in Sunday’s article.

Fortunately, there were some positives that came out of those sessions. First, I can dance relatively well. Second, after our final class, my parents and several of my friend’s parents took some of us out for pizza and while the bill was being settled, we youngsters started a snowball fight in the parking lot. J. Geiger attempted to cowardly hide inside his parent’s car but I so expertly threw a snowball that it slipped past the closing door and exploded all over him and the vehicle’s interior. I was so awesome, you should have seen it. My snowballing acumen has preceded me ever since. So I guess cotillion wasn’t all bad.

*During the children’s sermon the assistant pastor used a box with a false wall to demonstrate the Resurrection. She placed a little Jesus inside, closed the “tomb” and when it was reopened the Savior was gone. I told the G. I did not approve of such parlor tricks in church. She agreed, feeling it flirted too closely with witchcraft.