This weekend I was in DC to attend the wedding of my very old friend DeWayne and his beautiful now-wife LaJwanne. This was an especially fun wedding to attend because DeWayne and I have attended all our schools together--we were at Pope John XXIII grade school together, Evanston Township High School together and together at Georgetown for undergrad. So a ton of old, old friends and their parents were in attendance (my only complaint about the whole thing was that I was out wandering around the grounds, for some reason, heels sinking in the grass, when the Georgetown photo was being taken, so now my dream of appearing all cute and celebratory in the alumni magazine has been dashed).

Anyway, cute story: when we were in grade school, DeWayne's parents were some of the first to hold boy-girl parties at their house. I don't remember off the top of my head what year it was but I do remember that we were dancing to "Blame it on the Rain" so that would be 1989 which means we were 10. So we'd all gather in the basement and giggle and make fun of each other all dressed up and then after about fifteen minutes all the boys would go upstairs to watch sports highlight tapes while we girls were left alone in the basement. So we girls did what you're supposed to do at parties: dance. That was one of my very few Running Man experiences (that was a rough era for learning how to dance if you were of the Caucasian persuasion. Not for all of us, but many of us). We did the Running Man in place, and we did it around the table laden with refreshments.

Eventually though the music got taken down a bit, and it was slow dance time. But the stupid guys were all upstairs watching their stupid tapes. Who we were supposed to slow dance with? No matter. Rather than turn to each other, we all simply clasped our hands and raised them in the air in front of us, around the neck of our imaginary partner, who obviously was superior anyway to the dumb boys ignoring us upstairs. So we all danced like that, together, with nobody, singing along to the music (because our imaginary partners didn't mind).

So it was nice, finally, almost twenty years later, to attend a party of DeWayne's and actually have people to dance with. And nobody expected me to do the Running Man, either, thank god.