The All-White Party

Every year at the beginning of the school year, some of the Black fraternities on campus hold an "All-White" party at the Student Life Center. At the beginning of my sophomore year, John Jenkins and one of my fellow managers Chris Clark invited to go with them and some of the other guys on the team to the party. Well I got to the party and I was one of I think 7 White people, with two of the others being Jordan Smart and Aaron Noll, and then two more being women's basketball players.

I had no problem being one of the few White people there out of a couple hundred people, but there was a bigger issue at hand. Everybody knew how to dance. I personally love to dance, but I'm just horrible at it. I've embraced the fact that I can't dance, but I still do it anyway because usually there are a lot of people at a given party who can't dance either, but everyone there could. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of seeing me dance, I'm something along the lines of a much lighter but equally incompetent Albert Brennaman (the Kevin James character from Hitch). The link I attached is one of my all-time favorite movie scenes because I've been there and done that. I've never made a pizza or done the Q-Tip, but I've come pretty close.

So as the party went on, I was trying to stick to the Hitch philosophy of keeping my elbows 6 inches from the waist and staying in that safe zone. It was boring, but probably the right move. However, there was a very attractive girl that was there and we exchanged eye contact so I thought it would be a good idea to ask her to dance. She said yes which was a positive first step, but once we got to dancing, I knew I was screwed.

She had great quickness on the dance floor, hip flexibility was off the chart, and her feet were quite nimble. She had an array of moves that overshadowed anything I could do. Lateral quickness has never been a hallmark of my athletic ability and I had a lot of trouble keeping up with her. We danced for a couple of minutes and I was pretty out of breath and broke into a light schvitz (sweat) probably both out of nervousness and working so hard to keep pace.

After those first few minutes, she tried showing me how to dance or certain ways to at least give the appearance of knowing how to dance. She was very smart and a good teacher but sometimes you just can't teach ability, and I had minimal ability. So after another couple minutes of dancing, she turned to me and said "White boy, you can't dance". I was crushed. I knew I couldn't dance but hearing it from someone other than my mom or sister made the reality sink in. It's a devastation I still have yet to overcome to this day.