How to ruin a Friday evening. Last class in Junior High ended at 2:20,
or 3 if you count the vestigial "activity period" tacked onto our 8th
grade day in Middle School. Home soon thereafter, sling the books into
a corner (my math textbook, with its ragged, paper-bag cover, wouldn't
scare me until Sunday about 7, when I heard the ticking of the "60
Minutes" watch). A weekend full of possibilities....OK, television,
awaits. But I had to clear one last hurdle. Sullenly don the
grandparent-funeral suit boy, cause you gotta go to dance class.

Did you go? Wasn't it painful? At least at first. It was so
embarrassing to dress up and try to slither unnoticed into the "General
Purpose" room at Hillside, at about 6:15 or so. I think class ran from
6:30 to 8, because Pam Collins once bitched she was going to miss some
of "The Brady Bunch".

The embarrassment wore off a bit as I realized that everybody else
looked and acted as silly as I did. That's Scotty Gundlach grinning
weakly as he crosses the floor in his brown three-piece suit and
high-top sneakers. That indeed is Riggsy trying to pull a bridge chair
from beneath somebody's ass. Those chairs ringed the circumference of
the room, leaving a huge open space within. Look! Some creep lost his
tie out in the middle of that expanse. And it's a clip-on!! Two
points, Virrill!!! (Yeah, the creep was me).

The girls looked better, if only because they had so much more variety
available. Sure, one of them might wear something too pink, too frilly,
but by and large there were plenty of nice dresses we didn't see very
often in school. The only standardizing feature required of the girls
was white gloves. Guys wore ties, and girls wore gloves.

We had dance class in 7th and 8th grades. We fox-trotted most of that
first year, barely making contact. A girl held her gloved palms up; a
guy held his palms down, fingers barely brushing hers. We heard plenty
of The Ray Coniff Singers: "I want some red...ro-ses for a blue...la-dy.
Send-them-to-the-sweet-est-gal-I-know..." Side-together-tap,
side-together-tap, make a box and thank your partner. Greet your new
partner and start again, making an endless circle of civility around the
room, under your parents' eyes.

Jeremiah Richards, a spry, gray, dignified sort, and a lady whose name
eludes me, ran this show. But two sets of parents per week chaperoned.
That too could be mortifying, if, say, your Mom wore shocking purple, or
your Dad dozed, or worse, if they volunteered for the first class, as
mine did, before the ground rules were set. Might have been Amy
Farber's or Penny Dempsey's parents too that first night. Mr. Richards
paired me with the girl, and that was OK as we had no input into the
decision, so we couldn't be ragged. Then he pulled up some guy (Wayne
Anthony? Bryan Baker?) for the girl and told me to walk into that
Atlantic Ocean of a circle and pick a partner.

That wasn't OK. That sucked. 7th grade might have been 3rd grade as
far as my socializing with the opposite sex. Sure, there were the gifted
in our class whose Friday date, even at age 12, wasn't "Love, American
Style". That wasn't me. And in any event there were very, very few guys
who admitted to "liking" a girl in front of everybody. That was death.

Right then, I'd have traded places with Scotty and his sneakers in a
heartbeat. Then again, I was the clown with the fake tie, so Scotty
would have waived me on even if I wasn't about to make a very public
fool of myself. I had to suck up the inevitable "whooooosss" and
laughter, with my buddies Fine and Feinstein leading the jeers, and get
on with it. So, thinking James Bond but acting Beaver Cleaver, I
stumbled in the vicinity of Bev Fox, who was, if not the hottest,
certainly the coolest girl in class, and, to show it wasn't
intentional, I closed my eyes, spun around and ended up pointing at her.

The charade fooled nobody. Bev went deep red, contrasting nicely with
her greenish-striped dress and white gloves. Then Mr. Richards grandly
invited the guys to pick partners and we were off.

He ran a good class. I learned to waltz and fox trot passably. In 8th
grade we got Cha-Cha, and maybe Tango. Those dances were useful later
in life. Not so the "Rock Step". This was bizarre: hold your arms out
from your sides, snap fingers as you step to one side while facing
front, shrug your shoulders like an indifferent Frenchman, repeat a few
times, then step forward, "heel-toe" turn 90 degrees...and repeat the
nonsense. Idiotic. He sold it to the boys with enthusiasm as the
all-purpose step for any rock and roll dance. Right. Try it to "Johnny
B. Goode" or "Layla" or anything else played at a 9th grade dance. You
might as well be dancing to "The Star Spangled Banner".

Some of the girls were good enough to throw in their own variations, but
the guys weren't, and that was hard to bear. It didn't help that the
only songs that he played for this fruity little jig were Shocking
Blue's "Venus" and The Archies' "Sugar Sugar". Those are not songs to
feel cool by.

Mr. Richards, oddly enough, was cool. He made a style, and a virtue, of
good manners and polish. If some of us were calming our pre-class
nerves by squirting water at each other from one of those green
fountains in the hall, he'd simply ask "Gentlemen, would you please
rejoin us in the main hall at once?" The main hall! That's Nettie
Jensen's room, you goof! That's what I thought, but never dared to
say. He had command, and looked pretty sharp in his tux and studs.
When Bev stomped on a balloon or something during an 8th-grade class
(ever the bellwether, she'd by then 86d the gloves and traded the
"Brady Bunch" dresses for pants), he glided (really) over to her
and, with a thin smile, told her "please say good night to your hosts
and hostesses and leave immediately." She did what he asked. He had a
presence combining schoolmaster and talented uncle. Kind of cool, so
long as he wasn't demonstrating that "Rock Step".

So what. Mr. Richards's legacy, and that of his class, wasn't in the
steps. I got socialized in an atmosphere that, by its very artifice,
let me and others drop the usual caste barriers. I could chatter on
with girls with whom I had no classes, and therefore contact, in 7th
grade, like Laura Tellekamp or Yasmine Tetanbaum. Mr. Richards had us
greet and thank our partners, and that simple repetition let us shelve
patois like "a doy now!", "Sit Down!" "You're just a little doofy,
that's all", "Are you livin??" and other endearments that peppered the
usual banter in the school halls.

He set a fine example. It was OK, even cool to be polite, to talk to
girls, to ask them to dance, even on occasion to know the agony of
sitting unnoticed when he threw in the Sadie Hawkins variation once or
twice a night. By the closing party in May, 1970 (Knicks over Lakers in
Game 7 that night for the Championship), I was sad to see it end. Same
in May, 1971. Back in school the cliques and castes remained in force,
so it took more than a while to translate dance-class friendliness into
everyday interaction in, say, Mr. Westrell's class or the Cafeteria.
But it happened.

And those Friday nights kind of gave me hope that the rest of life
wouldn't revolve around narcotizing myself with "Love, American Style"
and a "Perry Mason" rerun.

David Virrill