I sometimes think of my first big girl dance with anything but fond memories. In some antiquated offshoot of southern belle-hood in Omaha, NE,a between our kickball match-ups and Egyptian history, most of my sixth grade classmates and I signed up for cotillion classes. Rather, our parents signed us up.
Most of you are probably so blessed that you don’t know what a cotillion is, but basically its purpose is to prepare children to be cultured young adults. I can’t remember everything that our Sunday evening classes entailed, but I learned that one shouldn’t put one’s elbows on the table. How one should set a proper table. How one should ballroom dance with boys with sheens of grease on their faces and sweaty arms underneath their dads’ suit jackets.
That’s where the dance comes in. The finale for our class was a big dinner and dance at the country club where we could use our knives and forks properly (I still remember that you’re supposed to lay your knife across your plate and take—BUT DON’T SPREAD—the butter from the dish with a special utensil), and finish the evening with a waltz performance. After the waltz, they would play Backstreet Boys or whatever was popular as a reward for our good behavior.
My classmates were psyched. I was not psyched. I think this was the dance that created my anti-dance stance which culminated in hyperbolic fashion with me leaving my senior prom in favor of Burger King hamburgers with my mom. But in the sixth grade, these were just nascent inclinations against dances and dresses and popularity, but there was still that nagging incentive to go—a good grade.
So I borrowed my mother’s dress. Not a dress from her high school prom or anything quite so romantic. I borrowed a dress that she wore to work—a blue, distinctly ‘90’s velvety fabric topped with a strange, woven bolero—and went to the dance. All the girls wore chokers and hair glitter that made their twisted up-dos into tight, industrial-looking coils and rods. All the boys looked stiff and small in their red ties and suit jackets that were too big in the shoulders and hung long past the wrists.
Nobody asked me to dance after the first waltz, and some of the girls wondered asked me if I had borrowed my mom’s dress. I told them I had. But I didn’t care. I got to eat a fancy dinner, and got an A in the class.