First Dance

-from the public landing, Onemo

Aside from not knowing how to dance, what I remember most about my first high school dance was the fact that I wore my mother's dress.

It was a blue polyester number that clung to my panty hose in all the wrong places. I had to wear one of her dresses because in the 9th grade my fashion style was more "tomboy meets burlap sack." I'd sooner wear bib overalls than put on a dress, which worked out well since we never went anywhere that would require a dress. Until that first dance.

Whether my mother knew it or not, an older guy had asked me to that dance. (She drove me there, dropped me off and picked me up afterwards; I just met him there. It was all very innocent except for the age difference.)

Steve was the much older brother of a classmate of mine. As a matter of fact, he was so old he was drawing social security was no longer in high school.

This whole quasi- date thing was nerve wracking enough, but when he asked me to actually dance that night, the flood gates of my sweat glands broke loose. Why couldn't we just linger on the sidelines and watch everyone else? Wasn't it good enough just to stand there and talk? Why dance? Why? Am I the only one who sees how ridiculous everyone looks? Just look at them! This is sillier than a Benny Hill episode, they're flailing around out there in fast forward mode, like they're in the midst of a seizure or something. Surely these people can't be serious.

But now here I was, sweating, wearing my mother's blue polyester dress which was in a full-out, static-cling war with my panty hose, and I was supposed to walk in these ridiculous high heels out into the middle of that dance floor, among all those silly looking people and dance? With Steve, who probably hadn't been inside a high school auditorium for seventeen seven years?

Thanks to post traumatic stress syndrome a survival mechanism known as fainting which blocks out bad memories, I do not recall anything else about that first dance, but I do know that I didn't see Steve more than once or twice after that. I blame the polyester dress and the static cling. The profuse sweating, the deer in the headlights look, and whatever feeble attempts at dancing I made while fending off a stroke panic attack surely had nothing to do with it.

Now, fast forward to this century today, when Chesapeake Bay Son has not only attended some school-sanctioned dances before entering high school, but he won a contest in sixth or seventh grade. In sixth or seventh grade. I think I was watching the Mickey Mouse Club reruns after school in sixth grade, how is it possible that he knew enough about dancing to win a contest? Dancing was on my television screen not my radar screen.

(Lawrence Welk, anyone? My grandmother forced us to watch it. This may explain a whole lot, including my fear of singing, dresses, saxophones, clarinets, side burns, leisure suits and Dippity Do hair dos.)

To this day dancing is not something I enjoy unless it's at Blog Fest, and then of course the wine breaks down those walls of inhibition, and I attribute my deep-rooted fear to that first foray into the dance scene in high school. And also that polyester dress.

Now it's your turn. Feel free to tell us about your first dance or just fill in the blanks below:

Aside from _____________, what I remember most about my first school dance is ____________.