Crazy Bald Dancing Man is back. He stumbles into my group of friends and dances for us, wiggling his hips as he spins within our circle. We look at each other between his upraised arms and around his gyrating neck and we laugh; the best part is, he laughs too. I prefer such a man to other men that can be found in bars.
There is, for instance, Bumping Grinding Man behind me. He stands awkwardly in a full suit, which leads me to believe that he has been at the bar since he left work. Perhaps he is a man of unparalleled corporate success, but I can’t quite see it. I see a cubicle. I see boredom. It’s all in his eyes and the way they cannot make contact with my own. Bumping Grinding Man is the sort of man a girl tries to avoid. He doesn’t dance with my friends or me – he dances behind us, occasionally bumping into us as if we might consider that an invitation for a more intimate dance.
Another man tries to casually approach me from my left side. I see him coming long before he is close enough to lean in and yell in my ear.
“I like your sweater,” he yells.
I look down, backing up as I do to avoid his breath, which reeks of alcohol. I don’t mean that it smells like beer or liquor. I mean his words smell like alcohol; I don’t hear them – they waft into my nose. It takes me longer to understand them. The path from the nose to the brain being, I think, somewhat longer than that of the ears to the brain.
I am not wearing a sweater, but I am not one to turn a cold shoulder over small details.
“Thanks,” I yell back.
I offer him my attention for a few moments. I wait patiently while he proceeds to misunderstand, mispronounce and, finally, re-create my name.
“Michelle?” he screams.
“No, Rebecca.”
“Barecca. Ha. I mean … Oh, OK. Becky,” he decides, satisfied.
I smile and look for help over my right shoulder. Where are my friends? There they are – laughing.
He asks me what I do, and I tell him that I am in school. When I say Boston University, something very strange seems to happen within him. A thing like terror flashes in his eyes.
“Oh,” he stutters. “My brother always told me to stay away from BU girls.”
At last, a perfect exit opportunity. After all, how is a girl to respond to that?
“I’m sorry,” I say and reach out for the extended hand of a friend who has been watching the conversation (if it qualifies as such) carefully – exquisite timing. We dance away together in the way that only girls can.
I don’t mean to say that I minimize the arduous task a man faces in trying to break into a circle of girls who have come to a bar together with intentions of leaving together as well. I don’t envy the position at all. I do think a more lighthearted approach is often met with more success. Crazy Bald Dancing Man, for instance. At least he is dancing with us, not behind us. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, and neither do we.
One man reaches for my hand over the heads of my friends. I accept it gracefully, step forward to dance more closely and collide with a man cutting through our group to head for the bar – incredibly awkward and quite embarrassing. The man whose chest I have just smashed into does not laugh, but the man who pulled me into him does. The crowd closes; we don’t dance, but I catch his eye from time to time and smile.
At the end of the night, my friends and I weave through the masses to retrieve our coats, which we have stuffed away in a corner. I am bounced like a pinball between some overly aggressive female counterparts to Bumping Grinding Man. I suck in my stomach and curve my back to move past a girl with an enormous bag and push my stomach out and arch my back to squeeze by a man whose elbows are blocking my path. Nearly there, I trip over the pointy shoe of a girl who is screaming into the faces of her friends.
“Let’s get drunk!” she yells, maniacally.
Can we be perfectly honest here? There is nothing smooth or graceful about the bar scene. In the confines of a dance floor the size of a shoebox, even the best of dancers are reduced to the shrugging-of-shoulders-and-swaying-of-hips dance that makes up my repertoire. If space opens up, I sometimes can throw in an arm extension with a twist of my wrist, and on a real good night, my knees and ankles will allow me to get low, get low. I don’t impress anyone with my dancing, and quite frankly, I’m not looking to be impressed by any man’s pick up lines or pelvic thrusts. What I want when I go out with my friends for a night on the town is to be entertained, to scream at the top of my lungs to songs for which I only know half of the words and, mostly, to laugh loudly and without reservation at moments which will become stories to tell the next morning at a very late breakfast.
Rebecca Beyer, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.
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