Father/Daughter Dance

by Hero Jenkins

I was dreading the upcoming Father/Daughter Dinner Dance at my daughter’s high school. When I say dread, I’m putting it right up there with root canals and IRS audits; I did NOT want to go. To top it off, I learned that every one of these dances had a theme.

Seriously?

Not only do I have to make a fool of myself on the dance floor (I can’t dance in case you haven’t already guessed) but I have to do it in a costume!

My daughter was a freshman at a new school and she was excited. My wife was giving me one of those 'wife' looks... like: “You know you are going to this thing don’t you?”... “You know you have no choice in the matter right?” My football coach used to look at us and say: “The only way you are allowed to miss practice is if you are dead and someone brings me a note from God." It was one of those looks.

When I was in high school we did dances like "the four corners”, “the bump”, and “the hustle”. I had no idea which dance moves were current so I tuned into MTV and studied them. By the time dance night rolled around I was ready. My daughter was dressed like a rock star with huge glasses, boots, teal blue tights layered by other odd looking clothing that didn’t seem to match, and a plastic guitar. I was her bodyguard with dark shades and a leather coat. (I looked very cool I might add.)

When it came time to show off my moves I strutted out on the dance floor with the confidence of a pro wrestler who had memorized his script.

As it turned out, most of the dances at that time didn’t really require the male to do much. I basically did a two-step and looked cool (something I was already good at) and the women, or in this case my daughter, did all of the work. They also did most of the dancing with their backs to their partner which I thought was odd but whatever.

I did notice one other thing on MTV though. After the female had danced for a while, and if she was dancing well, it was the male’s job to acknowledge this by pretending to fan her to cool her off. So as soon as my daughter turned her back to me, I started fanning her just the way I'd seen on MTV.

Now, those of you who are old enough to have seen “Saturday Night Fever” will know what I’m talking about. (For the rest of you it’s “Step Up” I guess.) Anyway, just like in those movies, everybody moved off to the side and watched us go to work. My daughter had her back to me and she must have had her eyes closed because she really didn’t notice what I was doing until her friends who had all stopped dancing to watch us started screaming.

“Your DAD is SOOOOO COOL!” they shrieked!

When she finally looked back at me (judging by the look on her face) I realized I had done something REALLY dumb. Though I had no clue what.

“DAD! What are you doing!?!”

Before I could react, the song ended and she took my hand and led me back to our table (to a thunderous applause).

“Where did you learn that?!?”

“I watched MTV . . . why?”

“Do you even know what you were doing?”

“I was fanning you... I don’t understand what the problem is. Your friends loved it and all of the other dads are jealous,” I said proudly.

“That dance move is not fanning,” she said through clenched teeth, “that’s SPANKING!”

“Ohhhhhh...”

The only thing that saved me was that the other dads were clueless and their daughters thought it was so cool that they never told anyone what it really meant.

There were other Father/Daughter Dances but we never replicated the “magic” of that first one. It didn’t matter though because I'd already guaranteed my “star” on the dad’s “walk of fame”... which no doubt would have been moved to the “walk of shame” had any of the other dads actually realized what I was doing out there.

Drunk Guy on a Bench

by Hero Jenkins

Around the time our kids made it to high school my wife and I started taking mini-vacations to New York where we would fly into Manhattan for about three days. We would get a room in a hotel near Times Square, get tickets to whatever Broadway play worth seeing was available, and then we would fly home.

There is a ticket booth in Times Square called "TKTS" where we would buy tickets sold on the day of the performance (theaters usually sold unsold seats at discounted rates). Sometimes we got lucky. We saw “Lion King”, “Ragtime”, “Chicago”, and “Miss Saigon” to name a few. However, sometimes the play was not very good... “Aida” comes to mind. It was billed as being on par with The Lion King. It was not. We never saw “Cats” though… those cats kinda creeped me out anyway.

One of the highlights of the trip was eating dinner at new restaurants. We found a restaurant called "Jekyll and Hyde" where wannabe actors and crazy people dressed up like characters from the time periods of Jack the Ripper and Jekyll and Hyde. They roamed the restaurant and made sure everybody had a good time by harassing the patrons and behaving oddly. The bathrooms were hidden behind secret passages and bookshelves and unless it was an obvious emergency (you were jumping up and down doing the pee-pee dance) no one would tell you where they were. You had to find them for yourself.

Then there was the “Motown Café” where performers who were dressed like the Motown greats performed on a revolving stage made to look like a revolving record. When the mood struck them they would leap off the stage and do all kinds of crazy things: like when singing “Dancing in the Street” by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, they decided to do just that. Before long the restaurant had emptied out and we were all literally dancing in the street!

I believe it was on one of these trips, while we were on our way to one of these dinners, that we encountered an extremely intoxicated man sprawled on a bench near the subway station. He was in his mid-thirties, dressed casually in jeans and a light jacket. To top it off he was wearing a lot of expensive jewelry and a hundred dollar bill was hanging out of his pocket. We were near Central Park which at the time was not the safest place to be.

My first instinct is always to help, much to my wife’s dismay. I approached the man and called to him but he seemed to be unconscious. I gave him a shake and asked him if he was okay. He swatted at me and grunted something that I didn't understand.

My wife translated.

“He said he doesn’t need your help... he says to go away and leave him alone.”

I shook him again. He swatted and grunted (again). It was pretty much the same message as before except I was pretty sure he added a few expletives for emphasis.

I couldn’t just leave him there! I’m pretty good at spotting crooks and I had seen a couple of them hanging out nearby. They couldn’t have been more obvious if they were wearing striped shirts and ski masks. They were totally eying this guy. I had no doubt they would rob him as soon as we walked away.

I tried to get him to sit up but he wouldn’t budge. There was a half consumed bottle of Jack Daniel's in his pocket and he reeked of it. I tried to get his phone number; perhaps I could call someone to come get him. The last thing I wanted to do was leave him where he was, the WAY he was, and then read about his demise in the paper the next day. Even if the best I could do was annoy him, at least he would get moving and get himself away from this obviously dangerous place.

So I decided to bother the heck out of him and not let him sleep. I started to give him advice on getting his life together and the dangers of drinking too much. Look at where it had gotten him: he was semi-conscious, spread out on a bench near one of the most dangerous subway stations in town. He grunted and cursed some more . . . my plan was working.

It wasn’t until the bushes started shaking (and laughing) that I realized what was actually going on. This guy was an undercover cop! And there were three MORE undercover cops hiding behind that shaking, laughing bush waiting for someone to take this guy's money so they could jump him!

They couldn’t hold it in any longer - they were cracking themselves up. Even my wife started laughing! The only two people who didn’t think it was funny was me and the fake drunk guy. He just lay there on the bench, sighed an exasperated sigh, and rolled his eyes.

My wife later informed me that they did this kind of thing on “Cops” all the time. How would I know??? I didn’t even WATCH that show!

Shark Attack Maui

by Hero Jenkins

Ever watch a movie where there was a hideous monster on the rampage devouring or killing everyone it encountered. Ever watch the reaction of the movie people to the monster? For the sake of this post I am going to divide these people into two groups: the ones who get eaten and the ones who do not.

When the monster showed up most people would run away. The people who managed to get themselves eaten all had one thing in common. They would watch all of the freaked out people run by and then go in the opposite direction to see what all of the excitement was about.

In the neighborhood where I grew up we had a different kind of monster.  Gang members with guns. As a result in my neighborhood if someone started running, you would run too. You didn’t stop to find out why, you can find out why later, once the danger had passed.

I told you all of that to tell you this. My wife and I were snorkeling in Maui when a colorful fish darting amongst the rocks below caught my eye. I decided to point this fish out to my wife but she was nowhere to be found. I looked everywhere for her, I didn’t see her. Then I looked on the shore and I saw her standing there pointing past me, out to sea.

What the…

She was saying something, what was it?

“SHARK!” I finally heard.

“Shark?”

I looked around and sure enough there was a dorsal fin, not more than ten feet away.

Now I have seen a bunch of survival shows and everybody knows that most shark attacks happen because the victims are splashing around and get themselves mistaken for seals or some other water creature. I knew exactly what to do; yet I didn’t do any of it. I freaked out and started swimming as fast as I could to shore.

By the time I dragged my tired body out of the water I was mad. How could she leave me out there with that shark?

“When you saw me take off, you should have taken off too,” she said defiantly. She was right, we had both grown up in the same neighborhood and yes that was the way things were done. But, here’s my point. She had to swim by me, all she had to do was tap me on the shoulder on her way by… that’s all! She could have warned me, but she didn’t. And to make matters worse, she was unapologetic. Neighborhood rules. Her job was to see the danger and take off… my job was to recognize it and follow.

So that was the time when I almost got eaten by a shark while swimming in Maui… well, actually it turned out to be a turtle, but it could have been a shark.

Getting Old

by Hero Jenkins

I used to practice shooting at the pistol range in my younger days. Even though I always wore ear protection I believe that all of that shooting has affected my hearing. 

Most of the time a conversation between me and my wife will start like this: 

I will hear something, but I'm not really sure she has said anything until I feel her angry eyes on me.

"Did you say something?"
"Yeah, I did... don't pretend like you can't hear me!"
"What did you say?"
"Never mind."
"Whatever."

So here’s my problem… my wife likes to talk to herself, actually she mumbles to herself. With my diminished hearing, half the time I can’t tell if she is talking to herself or me.

This exchange happens at least twice a day:

“Are you talking to me?”

“No.”

“Did you say something?”

“No.”

“I know I heard something.”

“I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to myself.”

“Really? You’re talking to yourself again?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Why can’t you do that in your head?”

“Why can’t you stay out of my conversation?”

“It’s not a conversation when you talk to yourself.”

“Whatever.”

Getting old is rough sometimes.

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