On Middle School Dances

MIDDLE SCHOOL DANCES

I can remember the first time I walked into a high school as an adult. It was for a tutoring gig, and I- fresh into the big city- found it all very surreal. The endless hallways lined with rust colored lockers, cracking waxed tile, stone steps up stairwells, each one sagging in the center as result of decades of being pressed into service for the greater good of public education. What really drove it home though, what transported me fully, was the cafeteria smell. The cafeteria food is a source of endless bittersweet humor while in school, and a great party line as an adult, but only because it is all so long gone. When it is immediately present though, that smell- it drops you right back into a pair of converse sneakers and an inferiority complex. I was 15 years old again, for only a moment, but a totally and completely. The actual cafeteria smell is, I’m sure, the scent of government-issued reconstituted cheese. I can immediately picture it in a grainy, semi-solid blanket clinging futilely on to some semblance of French Bread, and it has little to do with actual cheese. Perhaps the organism it was rendered from had a passing acquaintance with a dairy cow, I’m not sure, but it comes powdered in foil packets, and needs a measure of water added and stirred to get it to at least a cheese-like slurry. I know that smell.

I am sitting now in a wicker chair at the admission portal of a middle school dance at the school I work at. I tell you all this smell-memory connection stuff simply to express this point: If a kid comes in to this middle school dance engulfed in a haze of Drakkar Noir, Ralph Lauren’s Polo or Farenheight cologne, I will lose my shit completely.


For you who have forgotten, or perhaps more accurately, blocked it out, let me set the stage of the middle school dance. There are balloons, both hung from shiny tendrils and loose on the dance floor. There is a fog machine, spewing ethereal swathes of cool, moist carbon dioxide at ankle level. This is meant to be romantic. There is a disco ball and associated donut-shaped globules of evenly spaced light rotating around the room and covering the walls. Shreiking teenage girls who thrash their heads and their hair wildly while they hear their favorite pop song are also present. It is, in a word, atmospheric.

I am the chaperone tonight. My job is to monitor, be present, and yet not be present- this is their time, after all, and I represent Authority. I have to find the middle ground, make myself only semi-scarce, close enough to call out wanton behavior, but far away from their private mental sphere to allow them to make their first groping* steps towards romantic independence.

It is early yet, and this is a small private school in the suburbs. Social events are few and far between for both parents and children, and so kids show up fairly early, well before the sun has gone down. The younger set show up first, and by ‘show up’ I mean ‘come from another classroom’ – many have not even left school for the day.

I’m milling around, trying to act adult, and this is difficult because I am only semi-welcome. The kids realize I am doing them a favor, chaperoning a dance on a Friday night, and they are trying to be sensitive, but I know they don’t want me privy to their conversations, their gossip, their private world. I do understand- I remember the days of being constantly monitored. The difference is, I understand what it is to not be constantly monitored, to have people assume all is well and you are a capable adult, that you can manage by yourself. My live-in girlfriend of two years left me abruptly two weeks ago, and it is still raw and painful. I’m finding myself wishing people wouldn’t assume that I am OK, that I can manage by my self, futilely wishing that someone would come and check in on me.

Nonetheless, I have a job to do, and so I am keeping tabs on the early stages of the dance. It’s mostly the 6th graders at the moment, and they are mostly bantering around balloons, treating them somewhere between volleyballs and footballs. The sixth graders are too young to really feel properly self-conscious, and so, between volleyball sessions, are on the dance floor doing the Spastic Colon or some such dance. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be callous or condescending- I did the Spastic Colon for years, and still do when my roommates are out of town and I suspect my neighbors are all at their day jobs. It’s just amusing to watch.

It is, in fact, pretty tame. The presence of the 6th graders has relaxed the 7th and 8th graders, the ones with hesitant designs on Finding Love, and there are so few of them that they really can’t afford to get too embarrassed, lest they seem too adult in front of the younger ones. It is nothing like the seemingly enormous dances of my own middle school years, filled with false opportunities to engage in potential groping, including, of course, the dreaded “Snowball.”

The Snowball was a middle school standard, wherein the DJ** would line up a couple of slow songs and command the most popular couple to start dancing. Each time the DJ said “Snowball”- I distinctly remember an unctuous baritone, redolent of calling Dr. Love on on a late night radio Advice/R&B program- the couple was supposed to split, girl grabbing a different guy, guy grabbing a different girl, doubling the number of dancing couples, growing exponentially each time until, theoretically, everyone at the dance was locked in that “6-inch minimum of space” that is the junior high embrace. I don’t know why, given my motley crew of friends (brought together only for the reason that no one else would have us) thought a 13-year old girl would choose to have a change of heart and dance with a card-carrying member of the Spastic Colon Varsity Dance Team, but we waited at the edge of the boy side of the crowd, thinking that our immediate visibility would somehow override normal female sensibility, that they would choose us for the convenience of proximity over social suicide. Thinking back, I believe the DJ must have had the sensitivity to not let it go so long as to over –snowball, but as the pickins grew slimmer and slimmer, we last remaining few played out the scenario in our heads, wherein the inevitable last snowball came up and Mary the walking acne commercial takes one look at you, spits on the floor, and turns on her heel toward the punch bowl. The searing hot red ears that follow, along with every single pore on your face opening simultaneously is what is known as Building Character.

……………………………….


The kid DJ-ing the Dance comes up and starts talking to me. He’s explaining how he’s going to public school next year, how he visited the school already, made lots of friends, and how many of them were, in his words, “Totally Hot.”

I’m not quite sure how to respond to this. 13 is a little young to sit down and chew the fat about attractive women. I can’t see this happening at Public School- the line is too well demarcated. If a boy/girl were to call another girl/boy (or girl/girl boy/boy- let’s not be exclusive here) ‘hot’, he/they/she would probably understand that the student that they speak of would probably be another student of mine, and they understand that this is creepy. Perhaps there was distance in this kid’s mind, this other city allowing him to talk as if we were having a sausage party. It threw me. Things are a little too casual at small schools.

…………………………….

I’m listening to the middle school version of the Macarena happen . The lyrics are such:


Right foot 2 stomps

Left foot 2 stomps.

How low can you go

How low can you go,

Can you bring it to the top?

Can you bring it real slow?


Sliiiide………. to the left!
Sliiiide………. to the right!

Reverse! Reverse!

Ev-REE-ba-DEE clap your HANDS!

They are all dancing in sync, albeit with some fumbling. This is the dancing equivalent of painting by numbers, but it works, the kids are all participating and forming their own sense of community, and mostly having fun. Part of me is a little worried that they won’t have the same opportunities that I had to Build Character, but I’m understanding now why parents choose to send their kids to private school, and why I was sent when the public school system became unbearable for me. Watching growing pains happen to your own kids- and I’m speculating, as I don’t yet have my own, but being a teacher is the closest thing- might just be the only thing more painful than going through them yourself.
………………………………..

It is the last slow dance of the evening. By now, there are a few established couplings, and the kids are doing a fair job of monitoring themselves, in terms of hanky-panky. They are well away from the ‘6-inch’ rule- a good foot apart by guesstimation- holding their arms in the stiff-elbowed way that only touching someone else’s hips and shoulders in a possibly suggestive way for the first time can elicit.

I can’t say I much like teaching middle school. My memories of it are too disturbing. Still though, I think sometimes that the effective teachers are the ones who can see through the eyes of youth, and the very best can take them on and off like goggles- they can glean the perspective, and then, as is needed, pull them up on their forehead and offer a different path, that critical guidance that the kids really need but will never ask for. I’m having a difficult time with the second part, but the first- the empathy- is coming in spades. And believe me, I wish it were just sympathy because then I could remove the goggles, but no, I watch them and all the awkwardness and flinching and the sense of going through life with a flock of tiny hummingbirds all named Hormone flying around thier heads is too ‘there’, too actual, too present. My palms are flushing, I’m swatting imaginary bugs, I feel the eyes of 137 people staring at me, carefully evaluating How I Eat My Potato Chip. I try to breathe, let it go away, understand that I really don’t have the type of job that is written about in the NewYorker. I tell myself that no one is watching how I consume snack food. I manage to talk myself down, and it’s a little depressing, because I’m back to feeling small, hoping someone will come and check on me, see how I’m doing, tell me all the feelings I’m having about my own failed relationships are part and parcel of growing up. But I’m supposed to be grown up. It’s ugly, this emotional pendulum, but it does provide something, watching from afar, this peeping-tom version of empathy. I understand that the kids don’t dislike me, that they are actually grateful that I gave some of my time to allow their dance to happen. Come Monday, though- and Monday always comes on a Monday, no matter how much I want it to take a fucking day off- when they roll their eyes at me, when their arms are folded across their chest so tightly that I feel they might displace their internal organs, when they glower and try to act like adults, with misplaced words and mean spirited actions, I can remember this moment, watching them slow dance and fumble and posture and be consumed by the odd sensation of being suddenly adrift without a life raft, cast into the unfamiliar ocean of adult sexuality; perhaps then I can empathize, excuse their breaches of etiquette, and remember what it was like to be 13. Only from afar, though- God knows I couldn’t do it again.