So there I was…a tipsy parental unit to the left of me, an unclean, French-toast uniformed line of boy-creatures to the right of me, a one Mr. Jamin G. Queue (he would have none of the new, first-name-basis poppycock) teaching Cotillion around me and a bet lost to another writer from The Flail at the forefront of my thoughts, reminding me that I had no choice but to stay here and make the best of what was looking to be the interview from hell.
As a “graduate” of the program, upon my arrival I had been press-ganged into filling in for some snotty a-hole Greenburg who had decided that it was beneath him to attend.
The f**ker.
Mr. Queue ignored me for most of the lesson, focusing instead on maintaining a six-Bible distance between dance partners, correcting hand positions and tottering around the room in a manner arrhythmic to the music coming from the scratchy stereos.
He was entering that stage of an old man’s life when the fug from his mouth and his hair-filled nostrils starts to give off the ever-familiar, pungent aroma of feces.
Although eloquently mannered and soft spoken, Mr. Queue had acquired the certain glazed, rheumy-eyed look of those who have witnessed infinity through the ends of their nasal cavities. Or, rather, the end of the Cold War.
He gamely put up with the squirming, hormonal pre-teens and seemed not to notice their baleful stares nor the lustful glances of the Mommies Of Advanced Maternal Age from across the room.
Ah, the little chillens. How hatefully they glared at the opposite gender when forced to pick partners!
The indignation on the girls’ faces when Mr. Queue told them they could not choose their own partner but had to stay put and wait for some smelly hopeful with sweaty hands to cross the room and pick them as their dancing partner after losing the opportunity to dance with the prettiest girl in the room!
At this point the lesson was starting to get quite fun. I had forgotten how much it sucked being a teenager, and felt vindictively gleeful whenever one of the girls stomped on the cowish boys’ feet with their well-shod heels, which made the handsy perp moo plaintively until Mr. Queue threatened to ring its bells.
I’ll have to give it to the old codger; he certainly knew how to give orders. He lectured while he bent wrists, adjusted elbows and frowned at parental units and even me in my blue jeans.
“Cotillion!” he practically crowed, “why Cotillion? Why social dance?” I looked around.
Crickets.
The parental unit grinned genially at me and was starting to list to one side.
Mr. Queue looked rather forlorn, but readily divulged the answer when I confronted him later, after the class, “Cotillion…asks us to step into a romanticized vision of the past and the pre-existing gender roles waiting for us to make them real again. Cotillion. Even the word tells you something of its French roots.”
Here he paused to cough up some phlegm into a large plaid handkerchief he had tucked in his back pocket (my God man not in front of the children) before continuing, “and recalls the long-held traditions that survived the wars of the 20th century so that one day the middle school boys and girls could grow up and start having babies after they had a proper debut and society acknowledged they were ready for coitus.”
He eyed me beadily and looked ready to continue, clearly warming to his theme and to his attentive audience, but I stopped him and thanked him for letting me perch among the lemmings just so I could fulfill my end of the stupid bet.
I mean, really, if he said coitus one more time he was going to get his ass handed to him. He’d still be the olfactory smelling senior citizen teaching Cotillion.
But then he asked about My Mother, who was Such A Lady, and My Father, the Funny Giraffe, and shit. That’s when I remembered that the other half of the Cotillion class was Etiquette, and he had (once again) learned me a lesson. So I high-tailed it out of there, dislocated ass in hand and tripped over the door stop on the way out like the smooth middle-school graduate I am.