November 20, 2006
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You couldn’t pay me to be a kid
I’m watching a video performance of Wild Asparagus at the Avalon in Boulder. Originally I searched it out as a band that occasionally incorporates a bodhran and I wanted to look at different beater techniques. There’s more video of the dancers than of the musicians. Organized, or rather choreographed dancing makes me very uneasy. I remember my dad trying to teach me to waltz. I’m crap. I remember junior high p.e. when they made us learn drill team routines. I got a nosebleed and was allowed to sit out. Every day for a week. Geek stigmata.
Anyway, the memory this really jogged was 6th grade music class. They made us learn square dancing. I dreaded this. I dreaded this because we were forced to pair up, with a boy. There was choice involved. It was kind of kickball style. I shouldn’t have been too worried (I’m usually picked for stuff somewhere in the middle– whew) but I was. Overly worried. I was the same kind of worried when they made us climb the rope in p.e., same kind when they made us swim across the deep end later that year, same as when they made us recite Lincoln’s Gettisburg Address (which I fucked up, but avoided tears till later).
I think about these things and think I must have been a total stress-ball. In some ways, but not always. I kicked ass at wall-ball, four-square, dodgeball, and was KILLER at tetherball, killer. I always won lots of marbles. I could go pretty high at jacks. I wasn’t the tallest or the goofiest; I didn’t have the biggest sixth grade breasts (thank god). The art and music was fantastic. I remember making a filmstrip about Brazil and singing in the select choir. There was enough good.
But my god, the squaredancing, you could never pay me to relive that. Nice to watch now, but man, the sixth grade music class squaredancing? It’s like death in slowmotion.
But cake still makes me smile…
me, Dena, and Suz
Comments (15)
my fifth grade teacher. i don’t think i’ve ever known any single person who has made more people feel better about themselves than she did. she got almost her entire class to stay after school, for no credit or other form of repayment, to learn to squaredance. and dude, i still remember that as beign some of the best fun i had in those preteen [breastless, boyfriendless, bucktoothed] years. i never felt ignorant or naive around her, though i was those things in a huge way, and i can think of so many other teachers/assorted adults who would’ve taken that opportunity. she took such good care of us.
now i’m 32 and i wish she’d come to my cello recital. because i haven’t felt this way since then. hooo-whee.
How did you know i was so sleepy lately?
ew don’t send me back there. i threw up on my first day of school in junior high. (at first i typed sister instead of first, bwahahaha, maybe that’s what i wanted to do)
everytime i put on my shoes (the birks & roos) i think lovingly of you. (that last supper was fucking awesome) what’s with you and dinner parties? don’t you have that one of gina’s too? bwahaha.
me an’ dinner parties? you really have to ask??
it’s so you can play footsies with everybody, right? right?
The square dancing was a horror and a mortification. I wept over it. I had sleepless nights over it. And I will personally kill with my bare hands any teacher that tries to force it on my kids. Kill and rip out their motherfucking liver.
In my house, we spell “trauma” s-q-u-a-r-e-d-a-n-c-i-n-g. Totally.
i used to love square dancing, for the very reasons you hated it. it was a chance to pair up with a boy… ahhhh, Nicholas. i still remember…
Oh my gosh, you look the same!
I hated climbing that damn rope…I could never get very high at all.
LOL.. My sons class had to learn the salsa, in 6th grade, instead of square dancing. They would have prefered square dancing. All that moving of the hips was just over board for the wee teens.
Somewhere I have a distant, nearly lost, square dancing memory from childhood. Oh well, maybe it was just a bad dream and never happened at all.
We learned square dancing in 4th grade…luckily I went to private school, smaller class so we were basically all friends-plus we got assigned partners. I don’t wanna think about what it would’ve been like if there was choice…
On a positive note, look how much you accomplished!
-M
cake makes anybody smile!!
I hated learning stupid dancing classes in 5th grade. Why do they wait until we HATE boys to make us learn to dance with them? Why not teach us to dance in first or second grade, when we don’t care?
Did you ever have to learn to do the stupid Cotton-eyed-Joe?
I don’t know… I’ve blocked out the actual dancing. I just remember the paralyzing fear leading up to it.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I tain’t never going back. But we should play tetherball. I loved it.
Geek Stigmata?!
hahahahahhhhhaaaaa!
That is brilliant.