Reinstating the ‘Business Wear’ section of
his wardrobe after a two-year hiatus in the bottom of a plastic storage
container – the cheapness of which was matched only by its fragility – The Spear
has discovered that the first shirt he ever owned, ‘Old Navy Blue’, is still as
fashionably relevant to him as the day he first wore it some 11 years ago. He wore it to work today.
Whether this says more about the quality of
the shirt, The Spear’s fashion sense, his stinginess or his apparent lack of
muscular development since mid-adolescence, is entirely at the discretion of
the reader. One thing is for sure; it
has outlasted many other shirts in The Spear’s repertoire of upper-body
garments – and in style, mind you – since that fateful night in 2002 when it
made its social debut.
The night in question is of particular
interest to The Spear as it is one of a very select few for which his late-pubescent
self made any type of reliable recording not soon thereafter. What follows is a grammar-edited transcript
of the recording made some two years after the event, with the names changed,
of course. May it be taken as an
historic footnote in the life of Old Navy Blue, and as an example of the
Juvenilia of The Spear in the long-forgotten year of 2004.
The
Dinner Dance
‘The Dinner
Dance’- oh what a name! Eloquent, yet
garishly plain. In truth the name
described it all; we ate dinner and then we danced. I don’t know why we, as year ten louts,
expected anything more from the evening, but expectations were rather high, and
as is sometimes the case, high expectations give way to large disappointments.
At quarter
to six that night, the whole one-hundred and thirty-eight of us were milling
around the Smalltown Bowls Club, waiting for the doors to open. That should have been our first indication of
what was to come. The Bowls Club had a
notorious reputation, impressed upon us by the previous students who had
attended this function the preceding year.
I, like many others, tried to pass off this criticism as mere cynicism,
but even as I stood before that red-bricked, bar-windowed, two-storey,
out-of-date building, I knew at least parts of it to be true.
When
the doors finally did swing open, we were herded in - like so many cattle - to
the main dining area, past the ancient fogies reminiscing about long-gone
dances while passively playing the pokies, drinking and smoking. A brief photograph session was then allowed
before the night officially began, which instantly started off a chain-reaction
of blinding flashes across the hall. I
found the time to pose in one with one of my partners (the girls outnumbered
the boys), and then scanned the room for other possible ‘still memories’ with
friends. As usual, I had not brought a
camera as the idea of saying “Smile guys!” was a little bit too feminine for my
liking.
This,
only being a quarter-formal occasion, called for the males to don a long-sleeve
shirt, long pants and a tie. The girls
were merely required to wear something of a ‘suitable nature’, but, as with any
congregation of the creative beings that we are, there were those who could
simply not follow the dress code.
Males
entered wearing short-sleeve shirts and no ties, while some of the ladies
outfits were far from suitable. Anybody would
have thought the females were running a “Who can wear a dress that has the
surface area of a fifty-cent coin?” contest.
This being said, the supposed contest was still greatly appreciated by
the males present.
The evening
officially started with the head boy and girl giving speeches to their ‘all
adoring’ year-level, who mocked the male captain for his mis-quotation of the
word ‘nibbles’ as ‘nipples’. You would
never have expected it to happen, but the laughter was akin to a jet-engine
starting up; quiet and unnoticeable at first, but building up to a huge roar by
the end. I laughed so hard I was
crying. This was the highlight of the
whole night for me.
Next,
in true Smalltown style, came the dinner: The Buffet from Hell. The potato was aridly dry; the peas tasted
like fish; the fish tasted like beef, and the beef tasted like peas. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had
come in a ‘Beef, Fish, Peas Mix’ container.
The only object I found edible on the whole forsaken menu was the bread
roll. Throughout the dining assembly
many of the plates remained untouched, but we knew the principal would comment
on how good the food was next week.
It
was now time for the set dance. And we
thought the food was bad! Seventy-five people
compacted on a 10m by 5m dance-floor is a recipe for disaster no matter where
you come from. The close proximity of
the couples made for a pathetic version of the real dance. Aside from being kicked by other would-be
dancers in the kick manoeuvre, it was fairly impossible to dance the full
movements because of the lack of space. This
resulted in us looking like a bunch of seventy year old retired couples who
could no-longer be bothered doing the dance with coordination or grace.
With the
rest of the night ahead of us after the hopeless required dance, a more
suitable atmosphere emerged; one filled with dancing and drinking (by
teachers). My inability to dance made
way for such out-of-style moves like ‘The Monkey’, ‘The Robot’ and ‘The Worm’. Once I had finished retarding myself as the
unco-robot-worm-monkey, the night was over.
One second it is “Enjoy your evening,” and the next it is “Leave or else
you are suspended.” It was now time for
us to exit the hall and begin searching through the throng for our parents.
This
night taught me a valuable lesson: to never have high expectations. If I go into things with low expectations and
they are not met, I will be pleasantly surprised, but if they are met, at least
I would have been expecting it.
And the pre-emptive pessimism of The Spear,
like Old Navy Blue, lives on to this day.
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