First School Dance: Crossing the Generational Divide

NOTE: “Linda” is a composite of my friends. In 1954, the most common names for baby girls were Mary, Linda, and Deborah.

As my father pulled the car, full of giggling seventh-grade girls, alongside the Collingswood Junior High School gym on that cool September evening in 1966, I could hear the Supremes’ new hit, “You Can’t Hurry Love” ringing out of the old, red brick building. I could feel the bass notes thumping through the car. As the students opened the doors to enter, the music became loud, then muffled again, as if I put my hands on and off over my ears. In my mind’s eye, the bricks themselves vibrated with the beat. 

            My parents had debated about allowing me to attend the dance. I was now in the seventh grade, and my mother had ideas about my growing up too fast. I already knew the ground rules of my teenage years: no dating until I was sixteen, no drive-in movie theaters with boys, no hanging out in front of Mom’s Pizza Shop on Haddon Avenue. I could attend school dances, but only once a month. The other Saturday nights, I had to visit my Babcia in Camden. Babcia loved to watch The Lawrence Welk Show with me. So, three Saturdays a month, I listened to big band music; the fourth, Motown. 

            The pulsating gymnasium both beckoned and frightened me. What could it contain, I thought, that made my mother fearful? How would dancing transform me into one of those teens my mother was always talking about–the ones she called “fast” or “hard?” Boys were involved, I knew, and there were boys at the dance. There were chaperones at the dance too, parents and teachers, but it was a public school, who knows what they overlooked that the priests and nuns would not have tolerated at my former parochial school, Saint John’s.

            As I crossed the threshold of the gym with my girlfriends, I was petrified. What would I do if a boy asked me to dance? Would my mother find out? I was still young enough to suspect that she had mind-reading powers.

            Linda had already jumped out of the car and was talking to a boy on the gym steps. My mother frowned. I hopped out of the car and slammed the door before she could decide to take me back home.

            The door to the gym opened. My coming-of-age ceremony had begun. My first step inside would cross the dividing line between my new teenaged world and that of my parents. The music hit my ears. I could feel the beat in my bones. The gym was so dark I could hardly make out the faces. In the middle, classmates, mostly girls, bounced and gyrated. Other shapes, mostly boys holding bottles of Coke, lined the walls. To get to the locker room (where we combed our hair and applied way more makeup than was allowed at home), my friends and I had to walk the gauntlet of eighth and ninth graders. Faces peered out at us in the dark.  I felt claustrophobic and free at the same time. I tried to focus on following Linda, who sashayed confidently through the dancers, causing a ripple of heads along the wall to turn as we passed. More than anything, I wanted to be Linda at that moment, but following in the wake of that reflected attention was sweet enough for that night.

            As the night went on, the claustrophobia was replaced with exhilaration. In the darkness, drenched with the music of my generation, I danced with my peers, my tribe, away from my living room, away from my mother’s approbation. I danced over the generational divide and finally understood why my mother feared this rite of passage.