D is for...

D is for...dumb, drugs, dance

D is for dance...

You might remember my post about dancing and the heavenly waltz. I love to dance and I especially love to partner dance. I like to do the swing or jitterbug but you need a really good partner for that. A polka is fun and I really like to dance with those Cajuns and the waltz is one of my favorites but if I could do the tango with Antonio Banderas? Yeah, I think that would do it for me. Not that I can do the tango.

Coming of age in the time of free style where you really don't need a partner even though you ostensibly have one, partner dancing soon became a lost art. No one does it anymore. What passes for partner dancing now is clinging to one another and shuffling your feet around during the slow songs and that's really too bad. As I told one of the boy kids of one of the cousins at one of the many weddings, 'if you want to get the girls, learn how to partner dance'.

Of course, when it was my time to learn how to do that very thing, I was mortified to have to participate. Back when, as the saying goes, the young men and young ladies were instructed in the fine art of ballroom dancing. We were signed up about the age of 13 reluctantly or protestingly to further the social education befitting us.

Once a week we were herded into a big room, girls on one side and boys on the other as these things always sorted themselves out. Demonstrations were given and then we were instructed to get a partner and practice. I hated this slow torture, waiting to get picked when the boys had to pick partners though I didn't like it much better when we girls had to pick. It was just another version of gym class. The popular kids always went for each other leaving the rest of us to fumble our way through. At least I wasn't last. Skinny, curly hair, shy, always near the end but not last.

It wasn't just the dance lessons. We also joined 'dance clubs'. They had three or maybe four dances a year and everyone would go. The girls would all hang out on one side and the boys would congregate on the other. Some kids would dance but mostly we would just hang out, us girls waiting to be asked, because in 1964, '65 that's the way it worked. No one ever asked me to dance at these events starting a pattern that would last well into adulthood going to clubs with my girlfriends. But that's another story.

These dance clubs were just for junior high school kids and the last dance before you went to high school was a formal. And of course at a formal dance, you had to have a date or an 'escort' as some of us weren't allowed to 'date' yet. I was excited and scared about going. I had to ask a boy, or be asked but that didn't look like it was going to happen. I finally got up my courage and stuttered out my request to a boy I sort of secretly liked. I had one class with him. Of course, he had his own social group and already had a date. I was totally embarrassed and there was no way I was going through that again.

I really wanted to go to the dance though and time was getting short. I don't know where the idea came from. Probably my mother. My parents' best friends had a son a year older than I and our families hung out together a lot. He was 16, he was very cute in a Ricky Nelson kind of way and we were friends of a sort. And so assured that he would not turn me down, I called him up and asked him if he would take me to this dance. Which, of course, he did. I had a good time receiving the looks of disbelief on the girls faces, he was very attentive and when he brought me home he gave me a kiss.

Now that I think about it that might have been my first kiss by a boy that was not a relative. I might have kissed the paper boy though but I can't remember.

Going to that dance was one of my few small triumphs in junior high school. Not a part of the in crowd or popular group and not a part of the obvious out crowd either, I sort navigated between. But wasn't I the center of attention by all the cool girls who wanted to know who that was I was with at the dance and was he my boyfriend. I said as little as possible and just smiled knowingly. It was an easy fiction to maintain as school was almost out for the summer and as it happened, our families spent a lot of time at our beach house so I saw a lot of Chico that summer and the next. But we were really ever only friends. And that was better I think.

*photo - my 15 year old self and first official 'date' at my first 'formal'.

check out those gloves!