The
dance we were going to was The Sadie Hawkins Day dance where the
girls asked boys and therefore far fewer people went. After the cute,
quiet girl asked me she brought by my shirt which was the Sadie
Hawkins Day dance tradition so that we could all be matching
matchers. It was actually a really nice green corduroy shirt, much
nicer than any I had so I kept and used it for a long time after the
dance, like for ten years or so. The kids we were going with, mostly
athletes and their girlfriends, jet setters as we called then. They
were almost all football players except for two kids it been on the
wrestling team with me. We weren't exactly friends on the wrestling
team but we knew each other. Even though I didn't know any of the
kids we hit it off really well and by the end of our date and dinner
were all laughing about inside jokes. The funniest thing was after
dinner we all went to the bathroom before we left to go to the dance
and three of us were in the bathroom together and we overheard an old
man doing mighty battle with his bowels, swearing out and cursing
God. This struck us as exceptionally funny and we repeated things we
heard him say for the rest the time I knew those guys. Thank-you
random stranger with gastric-intestinal struggles, you sir were
comedy gold. After the basically uneventful dance the kid who was
driving us in his family's van noticed a little rattle, a thump and
some vibration. True to my hamartia of always knowing something about
everything, whether I do or don't, I suggested maybe the van was
simply out of alignment and that sometimes driving faster was the key
to smoothing that out. For the record, driving faster is virtually
never the solution to a car problem. Fortunately for us he only tried
my solution for a couple of seconds until he decided to stop the van
and see what might be the problem. The problem was four of the five
lug nuts on the front passenger tire had broken completely off and we
were down to a single lug nut holding tire on, and precariously at
that. Even I didn't have a solution for that so we had to stop on the
side of the road and wait for rescue. A lot of people claim the
wheels fell off of their date this is the only time, to my knowledge,
it literally happened. We finally rounded up enough rides and we all
got home and as I had promised to I called my girlfriend to tell her
about what we've done and play up the comedy of the night and down
play any close dancing and cuddling then may or may not have gone on.
After I'd gone away to college I did actually go on one or two more
dates with that Sadie Hawkins girl but nothing ever really came of
it.
