I have never been one much for dancing, but it seems these days with a big television show on the subject being discussed everywhere, it is hard to get away from it.
A couple of weeks ago I went to St. George to get my taxes done. I know that is a weird reason for heading to Utah’s Dixie but my accountant who has done my taxes since 1973 moved there a few years ago and that is where I go to solve my yearly mystery of what I owe the IRS and the USTC.
While there I looked up an old friend from my days working as a consultant for the Clark County School District in Las Vegas. He now lives in Washington and I called him up and he met me at a burger joint. Although I haven’t seen him for more than a half dozen years, he has hasn’t changed much despite the now 75 birthdays that he has celebrated. Since I last saw him his wife of many years had passed away and he has gotten remarried. We sat down for a shake and a sundae and that is when he told me how he met his new spouse: dancing.
I knew he had been a dancer and that he and his former wife frequented dancing establishments but when he told me between marriages he had been going to four to five dances a week, I was blown away. He regaled me of tales dancing with many different women, including two twin sisters, who both liked him too much and started to resent each other over it. Then they both turned on him. In these outings he eventually danced with his future wife and her sister at a dance too, and ended up only taking one of them as a spouse. So much for the twin experience.
Dreams about a cute girl
The thought of dancing brought back a number of pretty bad memories for me. Never a dancer, I have always been able to fall over my own two feet walking much less doing a two step. The most vivid and negative of those memories took place when I was about 12 or 13. A friend’s mother talked him into going to the new Arthur Murray Dance Studio that had opened up in Murray, where I grew up, to learn the finer art of moving your feet to music. Like a knucklehead, when he recruited me to come along I said yes. He was a fast talking sucker, and convinced me that the girl that sat by me in fourth period would fall for me if I could do the smooth moves on the dance floor. Deep inside a little voice said “No! No!” but my my desire for a very cute girlfriend overruled my good sense of knowing how bad I was at anything that had to do with gracefulness.
A place of dread
So one Tuesday afternoon after school my friend’s mom picked us up from school and took us to the place I would come to dread. My mom thought it was a good idea that I get some culture so she gave me the five bucks to pay for it. As I handed it to the instructor, an ancient woman as I remember (she must have been at least 35) I was thinking about all the comic books I could buy with that much money at the present going rate of 12 cents each. Instead I was about to enter a world of hell.
The dance class consisted of two other boys (my dumb friend who had recruited me and another kid he had talked into it) and nine girls. All the girls were from my school along with some from another junior high across town. None of them looked like the girl I was doing this to impress, but on the other hand I didn’t look like the quarterback of the football team they, themselves were trying to impress either.
Boys unwelcome
The instructor was very nice to the girls, but seemed to only tolerate us boys as objects with which to teach the girls how not to dance. I could tell she had very little experience working with young teenage boys, who at that age are not only unsure of themselves, but unsure of anything. I found out later she was a ballet teacher who took the job there as second income. Looking back, I would never burden a young teenage boy with the kinds of insults she gave us males and lack of patience she had for the goofier sex when it came to trying to learn something that was completely foreign to them.
After three lessons I told my mother I was sick on the second Thursday we were supposed to go and I didn’t go to school that day. By the next Tuesday I found out that the other kid that had been recruited said he didn’t want to go anymore so I got the courage to tell my friend the same thing. He went alone for about another week until he whined to his mother so much about him being the only boy that he got out of it too.
I know that the class collapsed because once the boys were gone, and the instructor tried to pair girls together many of the girls quit coming too. One girl that had been in the class told me later that with the boys gone, she turned on some of the girls in the group who were not built like ballet dancers.
That bad experience colored me for life when it came to dancing. I muddled my way through high school with the sophomore slides, junior proms and senior preference, but I never really did learn how to dance, and really didn’t want to. Now I watch shows like Dancing With the Stars and wonder why something like that is so popular when you could be watching educational television or CSPAN. Just kidding, but I do think they are foolish shows.
Luckily I married a woman who will dance with me at our kids’ weddings but doesn’t expect me to cut a rug on a regular basis. We are a perfect match in so many ways. The only jigs I do these days with her is dancing around the subjects of how much money I spend on such things as cars, dogs and camping gear.
The point here is not about dancing though. It is an example of what an adult, who is supposed to know what they are doing, can do to damage young minds. I have seen it happen in many other ways too. The coach who doesn’t place trust in every kid on the team and berates those that aren’t as talented. The teacher who only favors the kids that excel in their classes, instead of being an educator for all. The parent who favors one child over another, and holds that one up on a pedestal trying to force another child to be what they want them to be, and not to become what the desire in their own heart.
We all have a responsibility to teach kids right from wrong, good from bad, excellence and not mediocrity, but in doing any of that one also has to examine the tender mind that can be affect by how we do things.