Dirty Dancing

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 foot. 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 foot 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 Hop 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.

A Left-Handed Compliment

I was feeling good that morning. I woke up to the happy discovery that not a single one of our major home appliances had broken during the night and we still had running water, which is highly unusual in our household. Then I got both dogs all the way outside without getting the Wee-wee of joy on my feet. It looked like it was going to be a great day.

Then, like a fool, I picked up the newspaper. You should never pick up a newspaper when you’re feeling good, because every newspaper has a special department, called the Bummer Desk, which is responsible for digging up depressing front-page stories with headlines like DOORBELL USE LINKED TO LEUKEMIA and OZONE LAYER COMPLETELY GONE DIRECTLY OVER YOUR HOUSE.

On this particular morning the story that punched me right in the eyeballs was headlined: LEFTIES’ LIVES SHORTER STUDY SAYS SO. YOU probably read about this. Researchers did a study showing that left-handed people live an average of nine years less than right-handed people. This was very alarming to me because I’m left-handed, along with 10 percent of the population, as well as many famous historical figures such as Napoleon, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandy Koufax, Speedy Alka-Seltzer, and Flipper. President Bush is also left-handed, which has raised a troublesome constitutional issue because every time he signs a bill into law he drags his hand through his signature and messes it up. Nobody knows whether this is legal. “This doesn’t look like a signature,” observed the Supreme Court, in one recent case. “This looks like somebody killed a spider on the Federal Highway Authorization Act.”

Because of the way we write, most of us lefties go through life with big ink smears on the edges of our left hands. In fact, when I first saw the newspaper article about lefties dying sooner, I thought maybe the cause would be ink absorption. Or maybe it would be related to the fact that we spent our entire academic careers sitting with our bodies twisted clockwise so we could write on those stupid right-hand-only desks. I have this daydream wherein the inventor of those desks is shipwrecked on a remote island, and some natives come out of the jungle, and he waves at them in what he thinks is a friendly manner, unaware that this is the fierce Wagoondi tribe, and if you wave at them with your left hand, they treat you like a god, but if you wave with your right hand, they play the Happy Snake Game with your intestines. Not that I am bitter. Nor am I bitter about the fact that I always got bad grades in art class because I couldn’t work scissors designed for right-handed people. On Parents’ Night, when all the children’s art projects were put up for display, mine was the one that looked as though the paper had been chewed to pieces by shrews.

Nor am I bitter about gravy ladles. And if you don’t understand why I’m not bitter about gravy ladles, just try using one with your left hand.