My daughter, Theresa is a senior at Blooming Prairie High School. Last Friday night, the school had a Sadie Hawkins dance. Theresa asked her boyfriend to go with her. He didn’t seem too enthused about going, but he’s her boyfriend and he didn’t want Theresa to ask someone else, so of course he said that he would go to the dance with her. Theresa loves to dances and to dress up. She went shopping a week before the dance in Rochester with two of her friends. She purchased a clingy off the shoulder black dress, sparkly silver earrings and a bracelet. She modeled the dress for her boyfriend and me. She looked great in the dress, but her boyfriend still wasn’t thrilled about going to a dance.

I don’t think many men like to go to dances. My husband used to dance with me before we were married. We even danced together at parties the first year we were married. I like to dance very much. I am not afraid to draw attention to myself when I dance. Tom does not like to draw attention to himself when he dances, he prefers to be just a part of the scenery. He seldom dances anymore, except for once in a while in the kitchen.

When we first got together, disco was big and we were living in Belgium. One night at a crowded disco in Gent, Belgium, I embarrassed Tom tremendously when I got under the disco ball and showed all the haughty upscale Europeans a dance my friends and I had made up when we were teenagers called the monkey dance. The couples were all dressed beautiful and were dancing and doing turns just like John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney in Saturday Night Fever. They all stopped when I began to dance the monkey dance. I pretended to climb a tree, pick a banana, peel it, eat it and tossed the pretend banana peel over my shoulder. Tom looked horrified at me and screamed over the music, "What are you doing?"

All the couples at the disco realized I was an American and the whole place started doing the monkey dance. Tom left the dance floor and slunk to a corner hoping no one would see him.

The Belgians thought the monkey dance was the latest dance craze in America.

They didn’t know it originated with a bunch of 17-year-old girls goofing around in a living room in Albert Lea, Minn. Tom has warned me ever since that night to not do the monkey dance whenever I go out dancing. But of course I don't listen to him and have done it several times since.

Tom really hates that dance.

Like I said, men don't like dances as much as women do. Theresa’s boyfriend got out of going to the high school dance because he drove to St. Cloud to buy a truck with his dad. His dad bought the truck at an auction for her boyfriend’s uncle. Theresa’s boyfriend showed up during the middle of the dance with the truck and several of the boys in his grade left the dance to drive around in the fancy new truck. Theresa said she didn’t mind too much, as the truck was sold the next day to her boyfriend’s uncle. She knows that she can’t compete very well with a 2001 four-wheel drive, four door SUV.