Fort Nightly

When I was in middle school (which, back in the Stone Age, was called "junior high school"), my parents enrolled me in a ballroom dancing class. The class met every two weeks and it was known as "Fortnightly", which was always pronounced as two words.

I had forgotten about it until I bought a book of Dave Barry's columns at the animal shelter's resale shop, Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up. As hes said:

Our parents sent us to ballroom-dancing class, but it would have been equally cost-effective for them to simply set fire to their money.

True enough.

Like the class Barry wrote about, Fort Nightly was held in what now would be called a "multi-purpose room", but was the cafeteria with a stage at one end. To steal from him, the class started with the enemy genders lined up on either side of the room. The instructors then proceeded to try and teach the kids formal dancing.

They would have had had better luck teaching goats to speak Mongolian.

For one thing, the class was cruelly timed for the year that a lot of the girls had had their growth spurts and the boys had not. It was like watching a WNBA team try to dance with munchkins. But only if the munchkins in question had all of the grace and coordination of a troop of intoxicated baboons. The girls made sure to keep the boys at arm's length, mainly to avoid having their feet stepped on. The boys, in turn, responded the way that adolescent boys do in any uncomfortable situation: By hitting each other and making fart noises.

The final session had refreshments and the parents were invited to watch their kids try to dance. That went about as well as you might have guessed.

Except that one of the mothers asked the organizers where were the black kids. The school was about 30% minorities, mostly blacks, maybe a few Latinos and a couple of Asian kids and about that many Jews. The Asian and Jewish kids had been invited to enroll. Much consternation ensued.