Shall we dance?

by Susan Anderson
Tuesday, February 12, 2008 1:31 PM MST

The person having the most fun at an elementary school dance on Friday was a toddler.

Imagine going to your first dance at the tender age of 14 months and being the most popular person there.

This little guy was standing, feet firmly planted on the gymnasium floor, gazing around him with a bewildered expression. He looked a lot like most guys do at a dance, except that he was swaying to the music in adorable overalls and had attracted a crowd of admiring girls.

He never moved from his spot, and continued to take it all in for most of the evening, until he suddenly collapsed and had to eat. I felt the same way.

Mixed feelings

I admit to having mixed feelings about a mixed gender dance for children ages 3-12. But since they promised no dedicated songs that foster too much boyfriend-girlfriend drama, I agreed to go with our 12-year-old daughter.

It may well be the last time she actually wants me at such an event. Actually, it definitely will be the last time for at least a decade.

After stepping delicately around the swaying toddler boy, I stumbled right into another small child who appeared to be a bumblebee princess. Dressing up was a major priority for some of the girls.

Her mother informed me that she certainly wasn’t some insect, but Belle, from “Beauty and the Beast.” Bumblebee Belle ignored all this and kept eating her chips.

The food brought back vivid memories of my own pre-teen dances. Ripple potato chips and onion dip -- it’s great that some things haven’t changed in 40 years.

The pouting corner

Out in the hall, safely away from the very loud strains of the Chicken Dance, we found a male sixth-grade teacher with an air of, “Wow, have I ever seen it all.”

He was standing with his arms folded, while 8- and 9-year-old girls circled his corner, either crying or chasing each other.

“This is where they come to pout,” he said.

One young lady took a look at the other girls and turned around to go home, having decided that her dress was all wrong.

A second-grader had on what looked like a wedding dress. And I overheard one mom lamenting that her husband had taken their daughter, wearing spaghetti straps and glitter eye shadow, to church before the dance.

Right inside the front door was another location for a lot of drama. A preschooler began to cry when her mom said that the beautiful Irish setter that had come in the door would not be permitted to dance with her.

A mom rushed through the door, clutching a pair of pink socks that her daughter just had to have, except that by the time she got there, the kid looked at the socks like they were “rotten baby pigs,” to use one of my daughter’s favorite insults when she was a pre-schooler.

The mom sighed and put the socks in her pocket.

Crossword dad

Watching the dads at the dance was almost as much fun as observing the dress dilemmas. One was whirling his kindergarten daughter around. They both looked ecstatic.

Others were huddled together near the food, with their wives talking in another corner, just like the grade school boys and girls.

But the most surprising was the very tall and distinguished gentleman, a dad I suppose, who never looked up for the entire evening from the crossword puzzle he was doing.

Either he had great powers of concentration, or he had discovered the perfect cover for males who really don’t want to dance.

Only a handful of males were actually on the dance floor, and that includes the toddler plus a first-grade boy who seemed perfectly happy to be wearing a shirt and tie.

The clothes may change, but the boy-girl dynamics seemed exactly the same as they have been for as long as schools have held dances in the gym.

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