The Delicate Dance of Growing Up

Catherine: I suppose if anyone should tell a girl it’s not nice to dance on top of a bar, it should be her mother. I am surprised to find I have a girl who needs that sort of telling. I make this discovery on a Sunday afternoon. We are fresh from church.

Erin, my 16-year-old, and Emily, 16, the best friend visiting from Kansas City, decide we need to go shopping. Emily’s mother Lynn, my own best friend, and Emily’s 14-year-old sister, Meredith, come along.

Erin: Finally! After honking the horn so many times that our neighbor comes out of his house, the moms are out the door. My mom may drive, but we control the music. Emily likes country, so I settle for Shania Twain. “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.” We yell the chorus out the windows louder than Shania. Mom rolls up our windows from the driver seat when the hot guys in the Mustang next to us stare.

We disembark from the red minivan right in front of the Hard Rock Cafe in Fashion Island. When the prairie pals say they’ve never been in a Hard Rock, we opt to lunch there. We mug around the giant neon guitar in front of the restaurant. Two nice young men--geeks!--take a picture of all of us. I sense--is it the flip of the blond hair?--that Erin and Emily are mortified, mortified to be here today with this excess mother baggage.

We dance our way to the table while we glance at pictures and platinum records on the walls. Our talkative waiter, Ray, sort of cute but too old, strikes up a conversation with us about hamburgers and salads. He explains that tonight this place will be crazy. He says this like we’re old enough to come back. Emily and I smile, thinking what a great time that would be. Alone. Emily has her license already. Maybe?

We dismiss this too-friendly waiter and continue comparisons of how we set curfew and car guidelines. I love lots of things about Lynn, but one of her dearest traits is that she truly loves teenagers. She thrives on their overemotive, hyped-up selves. She giggles at the redundancy of drama class for girls this age as she recounts Emily’s adventures in community theater productions. I remark with a little bit of ahh-shucks how responsible our eldest girls are and aren’t we lucky. No trouble, really. Just good, sensible girls. Too bad we don’t all still live in the same town.

We pause to sip iced tea.

A trip to the bathroom changes the afternoon, for on the way back, we just have to pose near the bar, underneath the car that is hanging from the ceiling. A totally HOT waiter takes our picture and then tells us it would be pretty funny if we started dancing on the bar on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

We spy our daughters at the bar. No!

Excited by this thought, we hop up.

They are climbing onto the bar. Now they are perched on their haunches on the bar top like leprechauns in the Irish countryside.

We wait for a good song. Oh, look, here come the moms. They ask us what the sitch is and we explain our plan and we receive the “I’m not so proud of you” look. Having gotten this look many times, Emily and I laugh and continue to plan our dancing debut.

*

They are willing to argue. Not willing to stand. Finally, food calls us back to our table. Am I imagining hostility from these families that we pass on our way back to the table? I smile glibly at sedate children. Children who are not hopping up on bars. Children whose parents are assuring themselves their children will never do anything like that. “Over my dead body,” I hear one lady whisper. She returns my stare with a look like she just ate a slug.

Ha! We have not given up. We keep our ears open for that perfect song. Beach Boys. No. Disco. No. Techno. Totally no. And then, it’s here. Britney begins to sing the first beats of “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” and we are out of our seats, dancing toward the bar. In between screaming the lyrics and simple hand motions, our eyes venture over to our table. Whoa! Someone stop the music, call 911, our mothers are going to have a heart attack. Their sickened look with the “I have so much power over you” glare causes us to stop and trudge back to the table, where we are graced with the “I thought I raised you better” speech.

My chicken salad is tasting strange, or is it the words that spew from my mouth? Then, Lynn and I exhaust our lectures at the same time.

Now I hear only the battle raging inside my head.

Is it a good thing that I am here to see these girls and stop them? To tell them that playing up to hotties by dancing on bar tops is not a fine plan? To struggle to explain the impression a girl might leave by doing such a thing and point out that just because people notice you doesn’t necessarily mean they admire you?

Or. Do I wish I had not been granted a bar-rail view of my daughter’s graduation from innocence to the awakening of this heady power of being cute?

“Do you know what kind of people dance on bars?”

I am surprised to hear this thought I did not know I owned come out of my mouth. Is that me growing up? Growing old? What happened to the woman who once claimed “Born to Be Wild” as her anthem? I still remember the night I swore to my mother at the kitchen table over roast beef and potatoes that I would never be conventional, never get married, never have children and never own monogrammed towels. I was a bikini-on-the-beach-dancer being asked to act like a lady. I was 16. Oh, I know how Erin feels.

*

I hear Lynn tell Emily that girls who dance on bars are probably not thought of as nice girls and that Erin and Emily are nice girls.

I kick Emily under the table, and we shove food in our mouths to keep from cracking up. We try to explain that we were just having harmless clean fun and it shouldn’t matter what others think of us anyway. What does Mom mean when she asks if I want other people to get the wrong impression of me? She’s always telling me it shouldn’t matter what others think of me. Be bold! I tell her this, and it stops her cold.

Finally.

I regard my used-to-be shy and quiet daughter with a bit of awe. This is a side of her I have not yet seen. So hammy. So bold. So capable of bad judgment. I think it is time to go.

Emily and I disappear into the bathroom where we scream and laugh hysterically. As we leave, it is our moment. “Great Balls of Fire” is playing and we feel it is fair if we put on a little show. In the interest of not being grounded, we decide it will be just as effective if we stay off the top of the bar. Parading from the bathroom to the lobby, we sing and dance until we get some good stares. The moms, look at us in horror, pay for our meal and walk out, not looking at us.

Once outside, we burst into hysterics. We even receive some applause. We smile devilishly, for this applause has become our sweet revenge.

*

Lynn and I walk to the car with our backs to the girls so they cannot see our smiles. We don’t say much.

“They just should know,” says Lynn, “that they shouldn’t dance on a bar in the kind of place that sells condoms in the restroom.”

She repeats this to the girls, who act as if we are telling them something they are too young to hear.

“I admire girls who are confident,” I say. “I think also that a little silliness is good for the soul. But there are some things that mothers know better about, and dancing on bars is one of them.”

And how would you know so much about that?

*

Catherine Keefe is a writer in Trabuco Canyon. Erin Keefe is a sophomore at Santa Margarita Catholic High School.