Butch Thompson Trio, Lisa Neustadt, Jean Redpath, Helen Schneyer.
[undocumented]
Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon for just about everybody, except for the kids up to the high school there in Lake Wobegon, for whom it has been a tense and an anxious week, such anxiety that if you were not a teenager and did not have a teenager's nervous system, it would kill you.
Poor children, frightened to death. They were like chickens in a hen house that if you'd pitched a stone in there, they all would have taken off about 10 different directions, children pacing around and talking to themselves, and at night, their parents could hear them up in their bedrooms, tossing and turning in bed and getting wrapped up in the coverlets and calling out in their sleep, as if something was about to descend on them. 16-17 year old children, the cause of it all was that Friday night was the annual junior senior prom in Lake Wobegon. And I know that in most places of the country, boys and girls are pretty cool about dating long before they reach that age.
But in Lake Wobegon, it's a much bigger deal, because people frown on children pairing up too young, and so kids mainly travel in herds for all of their childhood, until all of a sudden it is the junior senior prom, and it's time for you to be cut out of the herd and to be branded, and to ask somebody to go with you and to go with someone, and it's time to try on clothes that You've never worn before in your life, and it's time to go from the square dancing and dancing the polka and the shadish, which are not really dances in Lake Wobegon. They're sort of like floor exercises, weight lifting, in some cases, to go from that to the close dancing and to do the close slow shuffle, and speaking as a boy, I know how strange it is to take a girl who maybe only knew before as A second baseman, a girl who could outrun you and might still be able to beat you up, and to take her in your arms and to know what to do with her as you go across the floor.
And how do you ask her in the first place? It's not like choosing up sides for the softball team. You know, you don't say, Hey, Karen, you're mine. Okay, you're over here on my time, you sort of beat around the bush, and what do you do if, when you finally do ask her, she sort of tosses her head back and laughs, oh, Lord, It's enough worry to make a person's skin break out.
And there's something else to think about. Long about Tuesday before the junior senior prom. You notice there's a big red spot right up alongside your nose here, and it kind of hurts a little bit. You're wondering what that's going to be like on Friday night? Does it mean your nose is falling off? No, it doesn't. It means something far worse than that. If your nose fell off, you'd get to go to a hospital, and people would send you flowers. What's happening up alongside your nose is something people don't send flowers for. Oh Lord. Well, it went off anyway, and they all went to it on Friday night, all except for some of the Lutheran kids, whose parents believe that dancing is sinful. And it may very well be it's very anxious. Anyway, the decorations committee had done up the gymnasium. They had big cardboard cutouts up on the sides of the walls. The theme was April in Paris, and they had cutouts of the chamzali days and the Arc de Triomphe there, and of the Eiffel Tower. And they had out in the middle of the gymnasium, a big fountain that actually worked, and it was all decorated, and you didn't notice, unless you got real close to it, that it was a cattle tank. It was a watering trough. In there had streamers down from it, and then making the fountain up in the middle was an irrigation sprinkler that had crepe paper round around it, and the water was dyed pink for the occasion, and it was on at very low pressure, and it made a very nice fountain as it fell down into the tank. And then the hose that went back to the boys locker room, they strung across on poles so as to make it part of a little Arbor there. And there was a sidewalk cafe with card tables and little candles on it, and it was quite glamorous. The high school band played for a while the French songs that they had learned for the prom Freire Jacques and April in Paris and sur les paul d'Avignon and how you're going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Paris.
And then after that, there were records, and it was very nice and dark in there. And finally, people did start dancing and moving more or less in the rhythms of the walls or something like it. Some, some of them look kind of like slow motion wrestling, but they all got out and they all danced with each other more or less. But there was one of them that the spotlight was on her. She was so beautiful, the Johnson girl, who was the queen of the prom, and who was not wearing what the other girls were wearing, they were in their sort of chintz formals with a sort of medium low neckline, with the band across the neckline that is drawn tight enough to leave marks in back.
She was wearing her mother's old wedding dress, and it wasn't stiff or formal. It was a lovely sort of satiny dress that hung from her and she looked so beautiful. She was so lovely. It was something that nobody had ever seen in her before, because she is such a good second baseman.
But there she was, rising to this occasion when children are supposed to put on adult clothes and talk adult talk and be adults. And evidently, she had wanted for a long time to be a woman, and that's what she was. She almost made the boy that she was dancing with look graceful as she sort of hauled him around on the floor.
Oh, it was lovely. You looked at her and you almost forgot all of the nervousness that everybody else felt and the sweaty palms. And you know, there's a problem at dances like this, on account of there is no sex education in Lake Wobegon. And I don't need to tell you why. You know why there isn't. It's an old argument. But still, there is none, because there are a lot of small minds in that town who would rather go off in the corner and snigger and tell smutty stories than to give children the chance to properly admire this graceful and lovely way in which all of us were brought into being. But as a result of there being no program like that, there are a lot of children at a dance like that who are very worried that by doing the waltz or by close physical contact or by kissing each other, that they may become impregnated and go into a life of shame. She made you forget all that. She made you forget all that. I'll tell you.
Well, the tension was broken. Finally, when Mr. Olson, the janitor noticed the hose screwed onto the shower nozzle in the boy's locker room. He didn't know what it was there for. You always do want to let a janitor know what you're doing, because they're the people who hold the keys of power. Well, he went to turn it off, but he turned it the wrong way. And that sprinkler in the fountain, just more or less came to life.
Those things can pump out water, you know. And this one went to it as if the crops were dry. It, and people fled for the exit, and there was general screaming, all except for the Johnson girl who kept on dancing, Something seemed to possess her, and it might have been the memory of all of the times she had danced in sprinklers when she was a little girl, but she didn't think this was any crisis. This was fun, and she went on dancing all by herself as her hair hung down over her face and as her dress hung down like a rag.
But her beauty did not depend on her hair or on her dress, and she danced on until finally they turned the water off, and then she stopped. And there I think I will stop, except that I will always remember her and the picture of her dancing, the picture of her dancing across the floor. She was, at that moment, a person who was truly in the Spirit, and though the prom may have been ruined and needed rescuing, she needed no rescuing whatsoever.
And that's the news from Lake Wobegon. What I can think of it, where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average, every single one of them.
Two benefit shows shows today, 4:30 and 8:30. 1981.04.25 La Crosse Tribune