Dance Lessons

The hemlines creep up every year. The shoes get so high they make Barbie look like she's wearing flats. If it weren't for the sweet little boutonnieres and corsages, homecoming weekend at the high school would be downright frightening.

The other day, I tried to explain homecoming to my Canadian friend, who is trying desperately to understand all of those "strange American rituals."

"It's the weekend the football team returns for a home game," I explained.

"Oh. So every time the football team comes back home, it's 'homecoming.'" Friggin foreigners. You'd think I was describing the equivalent of an Incan human sacrifice.

"No. Just the first time." The guy probably played way too much hockey as a kid, suffered too many whacks to the head. I was exhausted by the thought of explaining to him that the whole homecoming thing, as it turns out, has very little to do with football at all.

I decided to give him the short version. There's a dance. The girls spend all day Saturday running around with their moms, getting manicures, pedicures, up-dos, and professional makeup applications. Then, they go home, dress like sluts, and all the parents, the boys, and the girls show up at some generous soul's house so everybody can have hundreds of pictures memorializing the event. The girls can't walk in their shoes, they can't bend in their dresses, and they can't move their heads for fear they will ruin their hair. The boys look terrified.

"A dance," said the Canuck. "That's nice."

What an idiot. "They don't really go to the dance, silly." Those long winters clearly cause brain damage. "Not for more than an hour, anyway."

"If they don't go to the dance, what do they do?"

I was starting to think Canada must be a third world country. "They pile into a party bus -- an intimate group of about forty -- head downtown for an expensive dinner, then pile back into the party bus and return to some other generous and masochistic soul's house to hang out all night. And of course they don't drink. And, by morning, at least half of the girls have cried, hardly anyone is speaking to anyone else, and the kids spend Sunday acting as if they have just been subjected to the worst kind of torture."

"Sounds awful."

Oy. Hopelessly primitive. Why did I even bother to explain.