Extra at the Sixth-grade Disco

There is no greater film title than Saturday Night Fever. Growing up I was not immune to this ailment: in sixth grade I attended a compulsory disco dance class, held not at Club 57 but at the church in the town where I lived. I overcame my awkwardness and won first prize, an LP sized single of Andrea True's More More More.

This song makes me recall how much young adolescence felt like a profound fear of extrahood- a state of being marginal but feeling like we are too much on view. Do we each mature into our movie or do some of us remain mute backdrops to our own lives? The sixth grade disco extravaganza visibly demonstrated this situation: after the lesson part had ended and the music began, we all stood petrified with our backs against the wall. It was as if we had all become the pimply subjects inside some spinning church-sized centrifuge.The music blared but none of us could break the silence.

My feet couldn't understand the song, and neither could I. I had no idea what More More More was about. I whistled the song and would even sing it in blissful ignorance of what was going on inside it. How do you like your love? Was love something served another as you would coffee? What was all this stuff about getting the action going and getting the cameras rolling: Baby you know my love for you is real. Even the individual words I understood made little sense to me in the context of the song: how was love real (wasn't it always? why did it need cameras?) The song played in my head because it gave me the inkling of some mysteriously adult way of living and talking to other people but also some promise (within the song itself) that I could stop being an extra and somehow get in on the limelight: the song, so full of steaminess, says turn me on and turn the camera on.

Into my 9 year old imagination the song wormed by means of  a series of tiny nudging movements, identical to the the ones that Andrea True is making in her music video. Just imagine her boots performing a gradual excavational process downward into my cranium and you get the picture.

Songs heard when you are young seem like the script from the world of adults and that had mysteriously ended up in the hands of an extra, namely myself. The nostalgia I feel over this tune is in part for the mute wonder I had for it as I glued my back to the walls inside the church. It struck me then as an obscure guidebook to sex and love and language that I couldn't read but committed to memory anyways.

My partner with whom I won the competition was Amy Clark, whose gyrations made her pigtails move like they were part of a cheerleading demonstration. Amy, if you are out there, I want you to know that I am through listening to the album and would like to swap it with the one you won that night.