Lessons in Contra
In a fun story we’ll never tell the kids we’ll never have, my boyfriend and I met at a barn dance. It’s simply adorable, and has led to many other occasions for dancing. Andrew is from Virginia, and is a fan of contra dancing. It’s kind of a mix between Jane Austen-style prancing and square dancing. It’s very fun, but attracts a very unusual crowd. Well, that’s not really true. While most of the women attending a contra dance seem to be fairly normal girls or women reminiscent of your mother, the men fall into different categories. These are:
- Fun and a little weird,
- Overly teachy, or
- Gamers you’d hoped to leave behind in college
Previously, I’d been alone in these speculations; Andrew only dances with the other girls and misses my occasional frantic looks down the line. Luckily, last night I had corroboration in the form of two other women in our party, who agreed wholeheartedly.
As to the categories: The first kind are to be expected; very specific styles of dancing attract the slightly weird and fun, such as Andrew and myself.
The second class feel the need to paternalistically correct the woman with whom he is dancing. These can be verbal commands, such as, “No don’t place your feet like that”, or tacit orders, such as, bending your wrist the wrong way to move you into line until you say, “Ow, ow ow,” and snatch your hand away.
The third are exactly what you remember seeing at a single, large table in your college dining hall, but with fewer capes, occasionally no shoes, and increased amounts of knitting. Note: I don’t remember much knitting among the male gamers at Macalester, but that may be a regional variation.
I also learned that Andrew’s friend Seth has appalling taste in men. Seth and I were sitting taking a break from the action, and our time was mostly spent with Seth trying to decide which men, besides Andrew, were my type. One of these included a shoeless, feral creature that looked like a little brother you would actively avoid. This man would later make bizarro faces at me while we were dancing.
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