Dancing squarely

Last night, I received an email from one of my teachers, asking me to meet her in the library of our school at noon the next day to have a one-on-one talk. At first I was perturbed — in any English-speaking setting, a refusal to say what a one-on-one meeting will be about usually means that it’s going to be bad. Like, getting fired bad, right?

Then I remembered that French people, especially people older than 25, hate communicating via email or text. They far prefer talking in person, or at least on the phone. So, a request to have an in-person conversation later, rather than over email, is par for the course.

So I did meet with her. It was the quintessential French teacher, the one who looks like the actress from Midnight Mass and feels the Frenchiest out of all of them. She wanted to confer with me about two things: one, that students in her class are fracturing into camps because of hurtful things said on social media, and two, that she wants me to teach her students how to square dance and then lead a school presentation of the dance where I also play the banjo.

I blanched a bit, stuttered a bit, while she looked up at me expectantly (she’s half a foot shorter than me). I offered to teach square dancing, but I can’t lead a presentation, and I don’t have a banjo with me. It felt wrong to turn down all she was asking, so that was my compromise: no banjo, no big production, but yes to square dancing lessons. 

Most of my readers are from Tennessee, and will therefore already know that square dancing is not within the same zip code as Appalachian culture. That’s Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming! Those guys in the desert with cacti and horses! Not the hicks in the sticks!

I don’t know, maybe some people do square dancing in the hollers, but barn dances (which don’t have any set dance moves and are different from place to place) are much more common. I didn’t mention any of this, because I was out of my depth already and couldn’t parse together the French to explain this cultural distinction. So I just said yes.

In related news, I am going to spend the entirety of the upcoming fall break teaching myself how to square dance from YouTube videos. I want so badly to just scrap it all and teach them the Hoedown Throwdown, or perhaps the Cupid Shuffle. Both of those are closer to my lived experience, culture, and traditional roots than square dancing. Actually, you know what, we’re going to learn Hoedown Throwdown and that’s now set in stone. 

Jump to the left, stick it, slide.

P.S.: I asked her if the two main adversaries had physically fought yet, and she seemed surprised at my implication that a fight was imminent. She said no, they aren’t going to fight, they are just angry. Why on earth would they want to physically hurt each other? I said, ma’am, I am certainly not in Tennessee anymore.