I dunno much about horses, other than hearing half-seriously somewhere that the words a father of a pre-teen daughter dreads hearing most are, "Daddy, I want a pony!" But what would I do differently about the opposite sex if I were 16 again? I suppose I could find out easily enough. My Beloved Lady Companion and Comfort in My Later Middle Age first met me when I was 14 (then after high school we didn't see each other for about 30 years). I could just ask her, "What was I doing so wrong way back when that made all the girls think I was a scary geek from Mars?" But something tells me I may not really want to know that. However, more generally, I think you hit on something with dancing. I recall reading an interview with Gene Kelly where he said he took up dancing partly to meet girls. I then slapped my head and said "D'oh!" I never liked dancing, never was very good at it. But the girls liked dancing. They would dance with each other if the boys were too busy trying to look cool on the stag line or were smoking in the alley out back. Relatively few boys liked dancing for its own sake and most seemed to regard it as a dreary chore they had to submit to in order for the girls to like them. It was the human equivalent of bower birds, where females are driven by evolution gone mad to demand absurd lengths of absolutely useless displays by the males. But that's just it. The girls liked it, and they're the ones calling the tune here. If I'd swallowed my teenage male dignity (or come out of my shell of intellectual geekdom) and taken up dancing, I would have gotten to meet more girls, gotten to know the girls I did know better, picked up some social graces...

Posted by: Dwight Decker on February 26, 2003 1:02 PM

Hey Dwight -- The things we could have done better ... You raise a good point about the absurd sense of dignity teen boys have. Would we have been able to do things better even if we'd known? Or would our fragile and ludicrous untried egos have gotten in the way anyway? Hey, you got her anyway even if 30 years late, so you did something right.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on February 26, 2003 1:31 PM






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