First Disco!

Margaret and William attended their first dance this past Friday night. The Beckenham PTA hosted a “Fancy Dress Disco.” Here again is one of those language things – “fancy dress” really means “costume,” but we’d mistaken it to mean nice clothes or church clothes. Luckily, not many of the children came in costume and most were just in the clothes they get to wear when not in uniform. Of course, lots of the girls took the opportunity to wear dressy dresses. Mark, Ben, and I dropped William and Margaret off at the hall at 7:30 p.m. for the Year 5-8 disco, just as the Year 1-4 disco was ending! I would have liked to have seen more of the younger dance. What do Kindergarteners through 3rd graders do at a dance? At 9 p.m. we picked them up again and got to see a bit of the chaos. All of the kids seemed to be having a good time. Ben said it was just like the dances at Moore.

William said the disco was “entertaining, although I never danced. It looked chaotic on the dance floor! The PTA had hired a DJ that took requests for songs. I spent a lot of my time watching the other people react to the different songs and learning new dance moves. I observed that most of the time dancing was considered to be jumping up and down with your hands in the air singing along loudly. The PTA was selling “bling” and refreshments. I bought one star shaped flashing necklace (“bling”) that I promptly took apart for fun. My favourite part was when a song came on that I actually knew. Not many of my friends were there, so I got to meet some new people.”

Margaret told me this about the disco: “I really liked the disco because it was fun and exciting. It was pretty hot inside the hall, so I bought two bottles of water during the dance. My teacher, Mr. Bruce, was there and some of my friends danced with him. I didn’t though. One of the things that I thought was quite clever was that we were able to go up on stage and ask for a song to be played. I asked for Rockin’ Robin and Always on My Mind, but the DJ didn’t have either of those. I thought that the room looked really cool, especially with the DJ on the stage and the lights flashing. I had worn plats [braids] that day at school, and when I took them out my hair was poofy and it looked fancy when I put a black headband in it. I wore my favourite black velvet dress.”


In this picture of the disco, you might just be able to make out William sitting on the left hand side of the hall analyzing the crowd.