Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Johnny Can't Dance

Why didn't the nuns back in grammar school tell me that dancing skills and typing skills were the two most important things I could have learned at that early age? It's just not fair. Now, at the tender age of fifty-one-and-a-half, I can do neither well.

I have recently concluded that if I could type using more than two index fingers and my right thumb (with the occasional pinky foray to press the Shift key) I would be much, much further ahead in my career. Especially now that everything worthwhile in life depends on one's ability with a keyboard. Where I grew up, there were two tracks in school: the Academic Track, that would train the future movers and shakers of our world, and the euphemistically-named Career Track, which would prepare young men to be assimilated into the steel mills (resistance is futile). Typing was for girls, anyway, and for that sissy Brendan Behan who is surely head of his own accounting firm by now. It's probably called "Behan Counters" or something cutesy like that. I did the Career Track and can proudly boast that I can craft a birdhouse, build a nifty napkin holder and do mechanical drawing along with the best of them. But I still can't type worth a danm.

The nuns weren't real big on dancing skills either. At least, not on teaching them to others. Since most of the nuns were technically women, I am sure they were all born with that innate grace and rhythm that all women seem to possess. Go to a Singles Dance and you will see what I mean. Singles Dances are the one and only place in New York City where you can actually see more than two attractive women of a certain age gathered together under one roof at the same time. Excluding Macy's on the Day After Thanksgiving of course, but even The Curmudgeon has not the courage to face such an ordeal. But $20 gets you in the door, where you can experience the adult version of the first high school dance you ever attended. Women, dancing; their ponytails and cotton dresses now replaced by elegant up-dos and some eye-popping cleavage. Men, leaning; their uncombed hair and ill-fitting jackets replaced by- well... some things never change, do they?

I've never understood why women are born knowing how to dance, their lovely hips gently swaying to and fro with the beat and doing inexplicably graceful things with their hands and feet and hair. When men try to do the same thing, they look like- well, they look like Brendan Behan (and look where he is now). The best a man can hope to do is stand somewhere near the edge of the dance floor and do this modified
hunched over Neanderthal shuffle thingie, with the random Travolta-like arm spasm to let the world know that you have evolved far beyond your cave man days. And guys, warning: never, ever attempt to dance on your own, without a partner. YOU may think it is an invitation for that cute woman dancing by herself to sidle on over; OTHERS think you have had too much to drink, are really desperate, or that your blood pressure medication is reacting with your liver pills. More on dancing some other time. Or, is it moron dancing?

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