If I Ask A Girl To Dance

If I ask a girl to dance, the worst thing she can say is no, right? While serving out my 12 year mandated sentence in the Pelham Public School system, this was by and large the only thing I learned that stuck with me despite my biology teachers’ insistence that in order to be taken seriously as an adult, one must have a basic knowledge of Sickle Cell Anemia, or the compelling arguments made in the Real Life Application section of my math book which stated that Pythagorean’s Theorem is used daily by  ghost hunters of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in order to keep tabs on which bar the immortally inebriated ghost of General J.E.B Stewart has stumbled into. However, much like the 14^th century thinking that the Earth’s surface was flat, or the outlandish idea that Batman could hold his own in a fight against Superman, or the absolutely ludicrous notion that Edward was better suited for Bella than Jacob, the statement that I opened with, which for me had bordered on becoming Scientific Law, is a lie!

December 31, 2014: My family had been invited to my sisters’ boyfriends’ New Year’s Eve party and I was granted permission to tag along. Using context clues and your recollection of how many times your high school varsity quarterback began one of his Monday morning “I had an epic weekend” party tales with the phrase “granted permission to tag along” you can pretty much get a ballpark figure of how many high school parties I was willingly invited to. But by some Channing Tatum-like demonic possession I was somehow able to walk up to a female and string together a consonant and vowel combination that was, dare I say it, cool.  

It very well may have been winning my class’s 5th grade geography bee or perhaps it was making it onto the varsity Cross Country team my freshman year, but I had developed this carefree, ignorant attitude masquerading itself as confidence and thought “If I ask this girl to dance, what’s the worst that could happen?” We, as humans are only capable of using roughly 10% of our brains’ potential which means that, scientifically speaking, I was 90% more screwed than I could have possibly realized.

Her next decision, in all likelihood may have been the result of an excessive consumption of Bad Decision Juice, or possibly she had a few more high school community service hours to complete from several years ago, but I, Mark Woonton, was led on to the dancefloor by a 20-something year old Spanish girl.

Allow me to share with you my ethnic background. I am 50% Irish, 50% English and 100% certain of three things in this lifetime:

1.       My ancestors were some of the most horrible, awful and close-minded people in human history

2.       I don’t belong in direct sunlight for a moment longer than 2.5 seconds

3.       I must not come within a five mile radius of any dance floor anywhere at any time

Unfortunately, prior to this no one had bothered to tell me that most Latin songs have prearranged steps which are more numerous than those on an ancient Mayan temple.  So, she began to engage in an activity rhythmically and visually recognizable as the skill of dancing. I say skill, because I, on the other hand, had turned into an epileptic baby deer on ice skates.    

She looked at me and said “Are you alright?” But she didn’t say it like this was her first time seeing me after my grandmother had died. No, she said like the top of my head had just spontaneously burst into flames. After that, her voice took on a sound easily recognizable to any parent as Learning Curve Tone. LCT is used in an instance where you’re trying to explain something such as tying shoes or zipping up a jacket to your child a number of times not capable of being represented on a calculator and in order to compensate for your frustration of being solely responsible for bringing such a stupid little human being into this world and wanting to sound like Gandalf yelling at the Balrog on the bridge of Khazad Dum (“Child! Crawl back in to the warm, dark chasm from whence you came!”) But instead, you end up going up about ten octaves in tone and sound like a Furby in the soprano section. And standing in front of me on the dance floor I now had a Tony Robbins action figure complete with three motivational phrases: “Great!” Good job!” “There you go!”   

I very quickly sank into a positive self-talk, rehabilitating inner monologue “OK Mark, this isn’t exactly going how you had planned, but it’s going to be alright. Do you know why? Because you are calm and confident in who you are. Speaking is something that you do very well, so just think of something to say to smooth over the situation. Maybe try saying Thank you for the dance. Thank you for the dance? What is this the Royal Ball of 1704? No don’t say that!” But luckily, I had been so lost in my anxious thoughts that I hadn’t noticed the song was ending. The second the last note was hit she said “Ummm, I’m going to go check and make sure we have enough ice upstairs.” The lack of conviction in her voice coupled with absolutely zero direct eye contact told me that her and I had just entered into an evolved, adult version of the old “I think I hear my mom calling me for dinner” that I used on the neighbor kid who wouldn’t leave me alone in elementary school. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I live my life by the credo of Detroit singer, songwriter and my personal philosopher, Bob Seger “Don’t bother taking me to the disco, you’ll never even get me out on the floor!”