Dancing in Ballrooms with Boys

I am a 5-foot, 8-inch tall individual of medium build.  If I came packaged, my tag would read “Human, Standard Size.”  I get away with it now, but I have been this size since I was approximately 8 years old.  I had fluffy Hermione hair, glasses, and may or may not have experimented with olive khaki capris.  The word “swarthy” somehow applied to me.  If you were to see me on the street, you would imagine my name was “Gert.”

People see photos of  “Gert” now and say things like, “Oh, I remember my awkward stage!”  But this “stage” you speak of lasted for several oafish years of my life!  And it was during those years that I took cotillion.

In case you grew up with parents who didn’t know you needed proper training in ballroom dancing and cookie-nibbling in order to get ahead in life, now you know that cotillion was just that: dancing and etiquette classes.  Boys who hated girls and girls who hated boys gathered in one large community center once a week to nervously eye one another and sheepishly pose for their enthusiastic paparazzi moms. 

“Gert” did not do well in this environment.

I remember standing in line outside by petite, delicate little blonde girls, who actually argued about who would be forced to stand next to me.  “You stand next to her!”  “No YOU stand next to her!”  I shifted from one heavily clogged foot to another, sweating beneath my pink hand-me-down skirt that dropped straight from waist to mid-calf.  The goal was just to get through it—to endure—until it was time for lemonade and cookies.  We would trudge inside and I would sit wedged between two boys, who would eagerly lean over me to discuss “Dragon Ball Z” and which pretty doll-girls they hoped to dance with.

Cotillion’s saving grace was that most of the time you didn’t have to deal with the terror of choosing a dance partner; you were assigned one.  And all of the boys were over a foot shorter than me, so while they stared squarely into my brawny, guppy swim team-developed chest, I got to look over their heads and out the window, or send desperate “Save me!” faces to my laughing mom. 

When I did have to choose my partner, I would just wait until everyone else was paired off, and then wrinkle my eyebrows at the last boy standing in an, “I guess we’re both left?” kind of way.  Of course, I would have preferred to dance with the tallish-British kid who was named something like “Rupert” or “Algernon” and wore crested blazers, but I was happy to be with wee Jonathan with the high crackling voice, too.  The main goal was always to dance well enough to win a 3 Musketeers, which somehow, inevitably, made the unparalleled agony of cotillion all worth it.

This story doesn’t have a moral, but I’ll try to pin one on it anyway.  Chocolate rewards are a good thing.  Little girls can be bitches, but who cares, because they’ll probably get pregnant during high school.  It’s okay if you’re tall and oafish.  Wee Jonathan will one day come back from summer vacation and be taller than you, and you’ll get contact lenses, and people will forget that they didn’t want to dance with you, until you remind them via blog. 

And by that time, you’ll be an adult.  And you can drive to the store and buy lemonade and cookies and 3 Musketeers for yourself, and you don’t have to endure doing the foxtrot for an hour to songs by The Mamas & the Papas before you eat them.

Just eat them.

xx-Gert.

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