Struttin' my stuff...

That one time, on a class trip, I started a dance craze...

I am Emm, a femme of very, very limited talents.

I cannot sing, play an instrument, calculate pi to near infinity, act, or do much of anything beneficial to humanity.

I write as best as I can, I bake, I make a comical quip, and that’s about that.

Except for this one time, on a school trip, when I started a new dance.

(Yes, this post will feature ‘dance’ songs!)

Now, in the main, I don’t dance because I am afflicted with an incurable malady known as self-consciousness coupled with the comorbidity known as lack of coordination.

I am also something of a wallflower, in that I would kind of stand there watching other kids pair off in middle school to dance to songs like The Flying Pickets’ cover of “Only You.”

So the story I am going to tell you is one that is, simultaneously, the most awesome and embarrassing one I can tell.

In my last year of elementary school, my class had the opportunity to go on a week-long trip to Université Sainte-Anne, a French language university located on the southwest shore of Nouvelle Ecosse, or Nova Scotia, as it is known (but really, it’s Mi’kma’ki and I like that name better than Scotland 2.0).

At the time, I was really into French, as in I could speak it with considerable fluency and I had at least one teacher who was shocked I didn’t have any French heritage.

They would cry if they could see and hear me now.

I wasn’t great at writing French, but that’s another story, and I did get tripped up by gender in language, which I still find vexing.

But I digress.

This was one of those trips where there were other schools participating, which meant I was in the company of people who didn’t know me and my classmates who generally had nothing to do with me if it wasn’t teasing or bullying.

This is why your femme is a recluse and an introvert, except I was a bit of a hermit even before school, so I guess why I am the way I am is a tangled story, as all stories are.

Most of the week was devoted to educational pursuits, which included courses in French and exposure to Acadian culture (which spawned Cajun culture when the English opted to expel the French from land they had both stolen).

We were tasked with keeping a journal of our week there and I would love to share details from it, but I don’t have it.

My teacher was impressed with it and I think she kept it, unless I threw it out.

I will say that other than the story I am about to tell you my main abiding memory is being taken to a lab at the university where they kept specimens, one of which was a two-headed baby pig in a jar, and I remember writing in great detail about that in French such that I am amazed I did not become some kind of rule-breaking bioengineer whose research is funded by a Silicon Valley billionaire.

On the last night of this trip, there was a dance.

Now, being grade six students, meaning the median age was 12ish, it was about what you expect, as in popular songs of the day, lots of tween angst, and lots of chaperones.

My mom was one of them, kind of to my dismay at the time.

I wish she were still with us, because I would love to have her recount what this little-known historical event must have looked like to her.

Amidst kids who didn’t like me and kids who didn’t know me, something came over me that night, a strange desire to move that manifested in a dance I called “The Strut.”

Imagine the Walk Like an Egyptian dance but more basic in that, as you strut about the dancefloor, you do so alternating your arms from your back to your belly and take a slight bow with each step.

It’s like of like you are a malfunctioning robot butler who might also be a defective drinking bird.

I do not know why I did this.

That moment of inspiration and the rationale are long lost to time.

It might have been frustration, a desire to be more than I felt I was in the eyes of my peers, and thus a way to transcend dire lack of coolness, or maybe I just got the rhythm in me.

At first, I think I registered as spectacle.

I am sure there were stares, kids pointing, and laughter.

But the damnedest thing happened: other kids, probably those who weren’t my classmates, gradually fell in formation behind me.

And it kept going through the night.

It was, to the extent it could be, a sensation, at least enough that I got to dance one or two very chaste slow dances.

The next morning when we were all packing up to leave, I remember kids on the other buses yelling “Hey strutter!” to me, which may be why I refer to the dance as “the strut.”

For a moment, I thought I’d maybe shifted the way my classmates saw me.

I was wrong, because when we all moved on to middle school, I went into the first school dance with main character energy and did my little dance and was so thoroughly ridiculed that, well, I found a new wall where I could bloom with yearning for three years before transitioning to high school.

All this to say the strut never caught on like the Twist, the Hustle, the Dougie, or Hot to Go!

Instead, it languishes in obscurity.

Once in a while, I wonder if anyone who participated even remembers it.

I even tried to do it myself this week to see if I remembered it accurately and swiftly thought better of it.

Still, it makes me laugh and feel a little proud that, for one night, I danced, I jived, I had the time of my life.

I was the dancing queen, and no one can take that crown away from me.