Good ... Clean ... Fun?

A real live poster from a real live Grange Hall!

I think I just had the most wholesome Saturday night of my entire life and I didn't even hate it.

It occurred to me yesterday when I was regaling my very patient land-lady/proprietress with yet another story that started out or owed thematic significance to "I was super drunk and ..."  that maybe I should reign it the fuck in. On pondering my wild-ish past proclivities, I started to realize that even as far back as middle-school, before I started drinking in earnest, I sought out ways to get crunk, from that time I drank nine shots of espresso at the cappuccino stand in the mall and almost gave myself a heart attack to that time I furtively swallowed a half-pill of the phenobarbitol the vet prescribed my dog for his seizures because somewhere in the recesses of my mind I remembered that's what Marilyn Monroe OD'd on. I wasn't trying to be suicidally, just looking for some kicks. Kicks. They're for kids, you know.

Anyway, I've never been a "joiner." I eschewed team sports and all things virtuous pretty early on. I was indoctrinated into the delinquent club as far back as the sixth grade, when I skipped out on High Holiday services with some of my friends and smoked my first cigarette (I use the term "smoked" loosely), a Marlboro light. And washed it down with a Budweiser.  Since then I've been perfecting the art of drunken cocktail chatter rather than honing any particular skill or pursuing any real hobbies. 

But in the spirit of doing all kinds of humbling/embarrassing/challenging things that I've never done before, and because on some level I was romantically hopeful that I would meet my future husband this way, I invited myself along to a Contra dance in Montpelier last night. I begged a ride from a young, supremely rad couple who live close to me and whom I met just one other time, who go Contra dancing regularly and were totally welcoming and gracious when I basically inserted myself into their date night.


Because it was the night after Halloween, my host told me I should dress in costume, which I willingly observed. I dusted off my DIY Twin Peaks High School t-shirt, tied a red ribbon in my hair and donned an eyepatch in order to approximate the character of Nadine Hurley (sidenote: I do not recommend attempting to drive with an eye patch on unless it's absolutely necessary. Unless you like death.) After a pit stop to a casual college vibes-y taco joint for a quick dinner (and, who am I kidding, a tall boy of PBR, which served the dual purpose of further tapping into the David Lynchian mood I was trying to access and calming my nerves a little), we arrived at the Grange Hall, which I only discovered was a Grange Hall after mistakenly referring to the joint as a church and being corrected. Ruralness and churchy shit are so often closely associated where I'm from that I am consistently surprised by the persistently secular agrarianism Vermont embodies. So from what I can gather, Grange Halls are sort of like Elks Lodges, some strange melange of Free Masons and Farmers Union and Co-op. I am too lazy right now to fact-check this with actual data but this is what I gleaned from my hostess. 

ANYWAY, I arrived at this hall, and was directed to the basement, where I immediately discovered that I was a) one of a very few people in costume (my hosts were dressed up, so it wasn't like that weird Mean Girls thing where someone tells you to wear a dumb costume and makes you look like a moron on purpose .... but I did nonetheless feel rather conspicuous) and b) I was one of the only girls NOT wearing a flippy/flouncy dress/skirt. TWO STRIKES ALREADY AND THE NIGHT HAS NOT YET STARTED.

So for those who don't know, Contra dancing is a variation on line dancing, set to a live band. It's something that grew up in/around farming communities in the Northeast. By and large, the way it works is that you are paired up with a partner (it's frowned upon to dance with the person you came with more than a couple of times) and line up in two or three long "sets" across the dance floor. The caller calls out a series of moves (real, literal "do-si-do's"), which you do with your partner and your "neighbor" partners, like a little quartet. You move on down the line this way, always with your partner but with a rotating cast of neighbors. A lot of swinging happens. So much so that I was warned on more than one occasion to make eye contact with my partner so as to avoid getting nauseatingly dizzy, and which I tried to force myself to do in spite of the intense awkwardness of fixing a stranger dead in the eye. This eye contact is decidedly un-Vermonty and evidently one of the very few places Vermonters deviate from their otherwise rather unto-themselves social behaviors. 

I took this while hiding from my elderly admirers

I attempted two dances before sitting out, winded and embarrassed (in a good-humored way!) by my total lack of coordination and expertise on the dance floor. I'm starting to grow very accustomed to feeling like a hapless idiot these days. 

I had a moment of crisis about a half-hour into the 3 hour event wherein I decided that this Contra dancing thing was NOT for me, and ducked downstairs to contemplate sitting the rest of the night out. But fuck, 2.5 hours messing around on one's iPhone is both a really long time to fuck around on one's iPhone and totally crappy and lame attitude wise. I realized that if nothing else, participating would make the night go faster. So back up I went, and while I did decline a couple of dances and didn't have the confidence in my dancing skill to ask anyone else to dance (I would not willingly subject a perfectly nice person to such travesty) I had a pretty fucking fun time getting spun around and knocking into people and possibly attracting a few septuagenarian admirers. I spent 3 plus hours in a Grange Hall without booze and only 5 minutes or so of that time feeling trapped and like I wanted to gouge my eyes out, which all in all is a huge win. 

The crowd was an interesting mix of cute hippy-ish girls, pasty theater kid cast-offs, overalled farmer looking dudes, sweet 60 and 70-something personages, a couple of very condescendingly self-satisfied post-menopausal earth motherish women having their Stella Got Her Groove Back moments and one sweet-seeming young snowboarder-y dude who seemed like he took a wrong turn on his way to the mountain to shred serious gnar. A nice young mom who brought her eight year old daughter (and who must not have been more than about 27 herself) introduced herself, told me she used to come to these things all the time but hadn't been in years and made some shadowy mention of a guy who used to go and moved to California (was this her baby daddy? who the fuck knows?), and when I told her how dizzy I was she gave me a knowing look and said that she'd made the catastrophic mistake of showing up drunk at one of these things once and paid a hefty price. So no wonder these shindigs are dry affairs. Merciless spinniness (the old-timers REALLY go for it in the spinning department) + whiskey flask  = BARF CITY. Glad I only drank the one Tall boy.

I'm as of yet undecided as to whether or not I'll return to the Contra line, as it were. Some of the cute young flippy-skirted girls made it look so cool that I sort of feel like I'd like to get really good at it just so I can bust more than my usual Beyonce-inspired moves on the dance floor (moves that I am hoping above all hope were left mostly undocumented at the wedding I recently attended. Sweet Jesus.) But I'm pretty friggin' proud of myself for trying my hand at the Wholesome Life. BRB have to go mainline some vodka.