[557] in Humor
HUMOR: Classic Dave - Left Foot Forward
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Sun Nov 20 19:03:29 1994
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 20 Nov 1994 19:00:50 EST
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 94 12:25:13 PST
From: Connie_Kleinjans@Novell.COM (Connie Kleinjans)
LEFT FOOT FORWARD
Dave Barry
My son, who is 11, has started going to dance parties. Only minutes
ago he was this little boy whose idea of looking really sharp was to
have all the Kool-Aid stains on his He-Man T-shirt be the same flavor;
now, suddenly, he's spending more time per day on his hair than it took
to paint the Sistine Chapel.
And he's going to parties where the boys dance with actual girls.
This was unheard of when I was 11, during the Eisenhower administration.
Oh, sure, our parents sent us to ballroom-dancing class, but it would
have been equally cost-effective for them to simply set fire to their
money.
The ballroom in my case was actually the Harold C. Crittenden Junior
High School cafeteria. We boys would huddle defensively in one corner,
punching each other for moral support and eyeing the girls suspiciously,
as though we expected them at any moment to be overcome by passion and
assault us. In fact, this was unlikely. We were not a fatally attractive
collection of stud muffins. We had outgrown our sport coats, and we each
had at least one shirttail elegantly sticking out, and the skinny ends
of our neckties hung down longer than the fat ends because our dads had
tied them in the only way that a person can tie a necktie on a short,
fidgety person, which is by standing behind that person and attempting
several abortive knots and then saying the hell with it. Many of us had
smeared our hair with the hair-smear of choice in those days, Brylcreem,
a chemical substance with the natural look and feel of industrial pump
lubricant.
When the dance class started, the enemy genders were lined up on
opposite sides of the cafeteria, and the instructor, an unfortunate
middle-aged man who I hope was being paid hundreds of thousands of
dollars, would attempt to teach us the Fox Trot.
``ONE two THREE four ONE two THREE four,'' he'd say, demonstrating
the steps. ``Boys start with your LEFT foot forward, girls start with
your RIGHT foot back, and begin now ONE ...''
The girls, moving in one graceful line, would all take a step back
with their right feet. At the same time, on the boys' side, Joseph
DiGiacinto, who is now an attorney, would bring his left foot down
firmly on the right toe of Tommy Longworth.
``TWO,'' the instructor would say, and the girls would all bring
their left feet back, while Tommy would punch Joe sideways into Dennis
Johnson.
``THREE,'' the instructor would say, and the girls would shift their
weight to the left, while on the other side the chain reaction of
retaliation had spread to all 40 boys, who were punching and stomping on
each other, so that our line looked like a giant centipede having a
Brylcreem-induced seizure.
This was also how we learned the Waltz, the Cha Cha and -- this was
the instructor's ``hep cat'' dance step -- the Lindy Hop. After we boys
had thoroughly failed to master these dances, the instructor would bring
the two lines together and order the boys to dance directly with the
girls, which we did by sticking our arms straight out to maintain
maximum separation, lunging around the cafeteria like miniature sport-
coat-wearing versions of Frankenstein's monster.
We never danced with girls outside of that class. At social events,
girls danced The Slop with other girls; boys made hilarious intestinal
noises with their armpits. It was the natural order of things.
But times have changed. I found this out the night of Robby's first
dance party, when, 15 minutes before it was time to leave for the party,
he strode impatiently up to me, wearing new duds, looking perfect in the
hair department and smelling vaguely of -- Can it be? Yes, it's RIGHT
GUARD -- and told me that we had to go IMMEDIATELY or we'd be late. This
from a person who has never, ever shown the slightest interest in being
on time for anything, a person who was three weeks late to his own
BIRTH.
We arrived at the dance-party home at the same time as Robby's friend
T.J., who strode up to us, eyes eager, hair slicked.
``T.J.!'' I remarked. ``You're wearing COLOGNE!'' About two gallons,
I estimated. He was emitting fragrance rays visible to the naked eye.
We followed the boys into the house, where kids were dancing.
Actually, I first thought they were jumping up and down, but I have
since learned that they were doing a dance called the Jump. We tried to
watch Robby, but he gestured violently at us to leave, which I can
understand. If God had wanted your parents to watch you do the Jump, He
wouldn't have made them so old.
Two hours later, when we came back to pick him up, the kids were
slow-dancing. Of course the parents weren't allowed to watch this,
either, but by peering through a window from another room, we could
catch glimpses of couples swaying together, occasionally illuminated by
spontaneous fireballs of raw hormonal energy shooting around the room.
My son was in there somewhere. But not my little boy.
(C) 1992 THE MIAMI HERALD
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
