High School dance
I remember my first high school dance, the year was 1979 and I had just turned 14 years old. The advent of puberty had not been subtle to me and my hormones were rampaging through my system like a prison riot. As I entered into 7th grade, one thing that I found particularly heady and intriguing was the wide range of girls and young women that I was now seeing every day at school. Both the girls my own age as well as the older and more mature ones. It was a whole new tribe of exotic, alien, terrifying creatures; tall ones, skinny ones, shy ones, fat ones, ones with big breasts, small breasts, long hair, short hair, some wore make up, some were cute, some were ugly, some wore flannel shirts, others sported tight sweaters, tight jeans, short skirts, frilly sun dresses, peasant skirts, tank tops, halter tops, boots, sneakers, sandals, ones that giggled, flirty ones, angry ones, haughty girls that seemed to look right through you, and on one confusing day, one pretty girl even said “hi” to me.
Frankly, I had little idea of what was going on around me when it came to the opposite sex and almost none of my friends had any real idea either. Sure, a few of my friends, in particular ones with older brothers or sisters, could sometimes fill in a few blanks in the waltz of teenage courtship, but rarely did it make much sense to me. How did you decide if you liked a girl, how did she decide if she liked you? Who kissed whom? Where did you hands go while you were kissing, and what about your eyes (open or closed) or (God forbid) what did you do with your tongue? Was kissing even something you wanted to do? What if you got “excited”, could that get her pregnant if it poked her in the side? What did a boob feel like? Should you ask or just grab? One really didn’t even know where to start. All I knew was that girls made me feel very strange, both excited and terrified, attracted and horrified, equally cold but weirdly flushed.
Partially out of curiosity and partially because it seemed like a normal place to start, I found myself paying more attention to depictions of high school courtship in the movies and TV shows that I watched. I also tended to rely on the other major source of teenage life available to me at the time… Archie Comic books. Sad as it seems, I learned a huge amount about teenage dating from Archie, Reggie, and Jughead as they chased after Veronica and Betty (she was the one I really liked). One thing that seemed especially interesting to me was the “high school dance” because it was something that seemed relatively relevant to me early in my freshman year since I knew we had a mixer scheduled and I was going to go.
While woefully ignorant in just about everything to do with girls, one thing that I gleaned as a 14 year old was that pretty girls are often not asked out on dates (I have no idea where this factoid came into my mind from, but I recall it resonated with me). It appeared that for some reason, pretty young women terrify most young men, and because of this, many fewer girls actually get asked out than seems strictly fair if dating success were to be based solely on the lady’s looks and availability. This idea became planted in my mind for some reason, and I began to think that maybe I was on to something powerful. It was obvious to me that asking a girl out remained a risky thing but maybe, just maybe, there was less of a chance of failure if you asked out a PRETTY girl and by so, you could catch her in a situation in which no one ELSE had asked her out either. I fully understood that there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t still laugh at you and say "hell no!", but who knew, right? It seemed worth a shot… and so that is what I was thinking when I went to my first high school dance.
I remember being very excited at the dance, paying a couple of dollars to get into the decorated school gym and standing under the bleachers with a couple of my buddies. I was dressed in late 70’s “style”, a “Keep on Trucking” T-shirt, plaid hand-me-down bell-bottom golf pants from my dad, and shiny ox-blood loafers. My mom tried to talk me out of the outfit, but at that age, what does your mom know anyway? I was holding forth to my buddies about my great understanding of what I would call the “why the hell not”-theory of dating. After various dares and taunts, I told my buddies it was time for me to go find a girl to dance with and to prove that I was willing to put my money where my mouth was. Also, even then, it seemed especially sad to be wallflower at a high school dance.
My recollection at the time was one of abject fear and having a cold sinking feeling in the base of my stomach, as I headed across the empty dance floor towards a group of senior high school girls. By luck, the first one I approached was a real stunner, a cheerleader with Farrah Fawcet-style blond hair, pretty blue eyes and with a great body, standing with couple of other girls, acting cool and reserved… queens of their domain. I tapped the young lady on the shoulder and asked her if she wanted to dance—easy as that. I suspect my brazen and rather nonchalant manner caught her unaware and before she new what she was doing, she said “Sure, ok”.
To this day, I still remember thinking “Gosh, THAT was easy! This dating is going to be no problem for me”. So together we walked out onto the gym dance floor, one that was empty of any other couples. Just the two of us, a beautiful senior girl (17-18 years old) and a horribly dorky, poorly dressed 14 year-old freshman. I gave a big “thumbs up” to my buddies standing by the bleachers, both of who had looks of awe and respect and not a little bit of disbelief on their faces. Then, we took up a position facing each other in the center of the dance floor. The music started, and lucky for me, my first high school dance was going to be to Le Freak, by Chick (a huge disco hit in the late 70’s that had plenty of radio airtime). “Awwww… FREAK OUT” began the song (I’ll never forget it)… and my lovely dance partner began to move to the tune, sexy and graceful and mesmerizing. I, on the other hand, came to the very sudden and regrettable realization that I didn’t KNOW how to dance, much less “freak out”, and was reduced to standing there, on the dance floor, paralyzed with fear and indecision. Somewhere in the bleachers, I heard someone a laugh. I had to do something, so I closed my eyes and started letting the music move my body; and while I like to believe that I had some internal rhythm and disco moves (certainly I had watched Saturday Night Fever a couple of times) I suspect I really looked like some poor sod having a grand mal seizure. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was my first ever date walking back to her laughing friends.
What to do? Well, I was out on the dance floor already, and Le Freak, by Chick does have a killer beat, so I continued dancing, by myself, alone on a high school gym basketball court that had been converted to a dance floor, while everyone laughed at me. But, my FIRST dance (technically speaking) had been with the prettiest girl in our school, and that is a victory I will never forget. Sure, later that evening a couple of senior boys caught up with me and beat me up. But on the other hand, before the night was over, I managed to have a complete dance with a girl my own age.
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