If You Get the Choice to Sit it
Out or Dance ... Sit it Out

We sit at a blackened Formica cafeteria table, listening to fizz of ginger ale in Styrofoam cups. Pairs of young, godless philistines sway rhythmically to the sounds of Shakira. A half-eaten cake sweats beads of liquefying frosting. A gallery of geeks wearing thick rimmed glasses stares at the crowd longingly. Chaperones wear Pleistocene smiles and laugh like drunken donkeys, hawing stupidly while baring their yellow teeth.

It’s the thing we all dread, the monster in the closet, the madwoman in the attic, and the black cat in the wall: it’s the spectacle of the middle school dance.

With my peers wasting away all around me, I alternative between taking notes on a basics pad I stole from the teacher’s lounge and reading Jean Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness.” I find a good deal of his argument interesting but worry that he oversimplifies the distinction between subjective and objective truths. (Kant’s deployment of the category of the noumenal is much more satisfying.)

I’ve heard all the critics. Melanie Jenkins, you’re eleven years old, for God’s sake. Put down your papers and have a good time. An elementary student reading for fun should choose a book with “Ramona” in the title.

My own failings aside, someone must shine a light on the dark and miserable underworld of middle school dances. They all begin the same way, and have done so for fifty years. All the boys stand in a row on one end of the room, while the girls camp out across the way. Someone unearths the dusty artifact that is “Play That Funky Music, White Boy” and subjects the kids to a horrifying display of adult dancing. It’s like watching dead people rise from the grave and attack each other.

The routine has been sealed in my mind. After the adult dance, we eat pizza, drink soda, and giggle copiously. Since we haven’t gotten to high school yet, no one even tries to spike the punch bowl. Pre-teen boys sport over gelled hairdos, and gossipy girls pick out the weakest, shyest looking girl and ridicule her until she becomes the next Sylvia Plath. The coup de grace comes at about 9 p.m. when the mandated last dance is imposed. Everyone has to enter the death ring and pretend to enjoy being forced to gyrate to “My Lumps.”

People don’t appreciate the freedoms they have until they’re taken away. If you get the choice to sit it out or dance … don’t take it for granted.