Just a Swingin’
My freshman year in college, I took square dancing for my PE class. It was at 8 a.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. I was stuck in this class because I went to the last session of freshman orientation and all the cool classes like racquetball, jazz aerobics and even archery were taken. Still in my good girl, small town mindset, I thought, oh, this might be fun, and decided to just go ahead and sign up.
Boy, did things change quickly. First, I lived in a dorm with older girls who were trying to get kicked out of the dorm. You had to be a junior to be allowed to live off campus, so I lived on a floor with a bunch of sophomores who were trying to get kicked out early, thereby being forced to live in off campus housing. Therefore, the residents in the wing of my floor spent a lot of time in the dorm mother’s apartment due to too much noise and partying. I was still a naive chick from Hicksville, barely 18 when I arrived, had never been in a bar, and had never had any hard liquor. I quickly began making the rounds to frat parties and staying out really late, which immediately interfered with my square dancing schedule.
Our teacher was very dedicated to square dancing. She even had one of those skirts with the petticoats and tap shoes, and would wear various ones to class. She offered to hook us up with her seamstress if we wanted to have a special skirt made for class, but we politely declined. When we would get to class, never on time, she would have square dance music playing very loudly, and she would begin clapping, yelling at us to get in our squares and stomping her feet. Anyone who was late had to polka around the gym while everyone warmed up in their squares. Needless to say, I became really good at the polka that semester.
Surprisingly, very few boys took this class, so the girls had to square dance with each other, taking turns playing the boy part. There’s a reason it’s called SQUARE dancing, and not just because you stand in a square. Have you ever tried to polka with a girl? And how in the world do you do it with a straight face? At the end of the semester, our teacher was trying to get approval for an advanced square dancing class and passed a petition around the class for us to sign up, promising to take the class if it was offered.
“Uhm, my mother wants me to take jazzercise next semester, she’s really upset I didn’t get into the first session and I doubt she will pay for me to take square dancing again. I’m really sorry.”
And that was the end of my square dancing career, in addition to it being the last class I ever took at 8 a.m. during college.
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