I can not dance. At all. The most important word in that sentence is, of course, not. Seriously, ask my wife, known to me as She Who’s Got To Boogie, if I can dance and you’ll have to wait five or so minutes for her to stop laughing, get up off the floor and dust herself off before she can answer. Her answer? “No. No he can’t.”
Sad, but true.
I suffer from white man’s disease. Even worse, I suffer from Southern white man’s disease. Not only can’t I dance, but I think I can. See, I’m trying to be honest here. Maybe too honest, as it turns out.
Let’s try an experiment here. I want you to cast your mind back to middle school, or whenever you started going to dances that included the opposite sex. The lights were about half on and half off because, while the adults wanted it to look like a dance, they didn’t want to chance there being any sort of darkness where — you know — “baseball” could be played. There were colored lights flashing on and off somewhere in the room. Loud music, usually something that had been popular about a decade ago, was squelching out of speakers not designed for that sort of volume.
And, lined up against one wall, were the dudes. Lined up against the other wall were the dudettes. And in the middle? An empty dance floor, the lines from the basketball court looking all lonely out there alone.
Eventually, someone would cross to the other side, grab another person from the wall and drag them out to the middle. That would normally break the ice and most of the walls would empty.
I, however, would not be one of those dancing. Even at that early age, I knew that wailing around on the dance floor like a spastic chicken having just been shortened by about a head’s height would not be good for my rep. Such as it was. So I, like a lot of Southern boys, learned to chair dance. That is, I’d sit in a chair and try to tap my feet to the music. Try to find the beat. It was practice, you see, for when I would eventually have to hit the dance floor and found that all I could do, really, was tap my feet to the beat and move my arms just a little.
Now. I told you that story so I could tell you this one.
Apparently, the dance gene did skip a generation. My middle little dude, Zippy the Monkey Boy, likes to think of himself as a bit of a Lothario. A dude with the moves, you see, but without the intent to deceive.
Zippy has more confidence and dancability in his little finger than I’ve got in my whole body. I found this out when I was looking at the pictures from his school’s prom. In almost every picture he was in, he was dancing. Out on the floor and moving like there was to be no tomorrow.
I asked him about it and he said, “Yeah. I am.” Then he told me a story about a kid he didn’t like and who didn’t like him. This dude came up to him and said, “I hate to admit it, (Zippy), but you’re a pretty good dancer.”
Even though I have no idea what that would feel like, I’m going to try and do my best to encourage him. Being able to dance will certainly come in handy when he wants to actually talk to the girls around him during a dance. I mean, it’s a lot easier for folks who can do it to get up and dance than it is to find something to talk about that won’t make you look like an idiot.
Trust me. I say this from experience. Because, lucky me, I get to look like an idiot whether I’m dancing or not.
– Richard
Tags: A Dude's Guide to Kids, A Dude's Guide to Life, Adults, baseball, Basketball Court, Boogie, boys, Chair Dance, Dance Floor, Dances, Darkness, Decade, dude, Dude's, Dudette, Dudettes, Feet, girls, I Dance, kid, Laugh, laughing, Light Fandango, little dude, Loud Music, Lucky, Man, men, Monkey Boy, music, Opposite Sex, richard, school, Southern Boys, Spastic Chicken, Speakers, White Man, wife