Cotillion Sucks!

So, last night I'm trying to get some reading done at a local Starbucks, when a hoard of sweet-sixteen-year-olds comes tromping into my quiet space in the back.

In typically redneck Southern style, they're all wearing rather tragic impressions of their parents dress clothes for the Alamance County Country Club Cotillion Dance...

Well, if their parents were drag queens, of course.













This dance is hosted yearly by my hometown's local Country Club, and as my Grandparents are members, I, too, was once forced to attend said Cotillion Dance.

Seeing them brought back painful, yet lovely, memories...of my being the COOLEST girl in TOWN, simply by giving less of a shit about this dance than anyone else I knew. That...and I was hot. What can I say? It's the truth.

I remember my Mother bought me this tiny black dress with slits cut into the back of it, and the highest pair of stiletto heels my teenaged feet had ever dared to slip into. I spent about two hours waiting for her to finish primping my hair and make-up...all while grumpily reading a magazine and wishing the whole evening far, far away. I loved my Mom's effort, but please...the boys in town were inbred, farm boy duesch-bags unfit to walk erect. And they knew it.

So, two hours later...my hair sufficiently curled and shellacked with approximately three pounds of hair spray...my entire body perfumed with enough Coco Chanel to raise the dead...and I was off to the party.

My date, as I remember, was this hot-shot boy from out of town...I think his name was Brian, but what truly sticks in my mind is his long, blonde sideburns and Kurt Cobain-ish sensibility. The perfect date for a "fuck em all" sort of nighttime affair.

At the dance, I remember all the local cheerleaders and jock-assholes staring at Brian and I as we walked across the floor. Simply FYI: they were staring at me because I was only NEWLY hot. For about fifteen years previous to this one, I was the known Fat Kid...about 5'2", 140 lbs, with thick glasses and bad skin. Miraculously, when I turned sixteen, puberty hit: I grew 5 inches, lost 30 lbs., got contact lenses, and my skin finally cleared up. They were a bit astonished. Brian never knew what I looked like before that night, really, because he'd only just moved into town and entered our high school that year, so he was clueless. Walking across the floor with everyone staring at us that night, however, he was pretty puffed up, as I remember.

Anyway, we had a great time and made all the stuck-up princess bitches and their redneck frog princes jealous. It's a good, yet painfully awkward, memory of my youth.

And last night, when I saw that big troupe of ridiculously push-up-bra-ed girls and they're pimply-faced dates tramp through here, I felt a bit nostalgic. And, in a way, I silently forgave the idiot kids I knew in my youth...all those teenagers staring at me as I crossed the floor, newly hottied and all. Because looking at these modern-day kids, I realize that Cotillion dances suck for everyone...the popular and the not-so-popular...the old hottie and the new...because nobody likes crossing that dance floor in life.

xo,
Rebel Deb