Your body, ages 10 to 16
1. Natalie celebrated her 10th birthday with 12 of her closest friends at Skate King, where the lights are low, the mirror ball glitters, the music crescendos every 30 seconds, and the bathrooms are labeled Kings and Queens. The girls, wearing rollerblades, seemed preternaturally tall, as if they were wearing high heels. My father had come up to Seattle from the Bay Area in honor of Natalie's big day, and at the party he mentioned to me that Natalie looked a little plump, her belly edging over her waistband; I asked him if he ever gave it a rest.
Several of Natalie's friends bought Best Friends split necklaces: one girl wears one half while her best friend wears the other. There was quite a competition for certain girls. Natalie's best friend, Amanda, asked the DJ to play a Michelle Branch song, and when it came on, Amanda beamed.
Seeing the lights go off, all of the younger girls rushed onto the rink. They liked the dark setting, which made them feel less noticeable, and yet Natalie and several of her friends were wearing orange glow sticks. So they didn't want their bodies to be noticed, but they did want their bodies to be noticed. This, I want to say, is the crux of the matter.
The girls skated backward. Then they skated in the regular direction. After a while they did the limbo. The DJ played the standards: "I Will Survive," "Gloria," "YMCA," "Stayin' Alive," Madonna, the Black Eyed Peas, Avril Lavigne, Usher. Some of Natalie's friends bought plastic roses for themselves. Two teenaged kids were feverishly making out in a far corner. Duly noted by my father, who informed the management--quickly remedied. A quirky Puritanism: his abhorrence of any public display of affection. Whenever Laurie and I go to a movie with him, if I put my arm around her or hold her hand, he inevitably--and unconsciously, I think--erupts into a coughing fit until the PDA passes.
As the father of a daughter who remains a Skate King devotee, I find the place utterly terrifying. It's all about amplifying kids' sense of themselves as magical creatures and converting this feeling into sexual yearning--a group march toward future prospects. For Natalie and her friends, still, just barely, the purpose of Skate King is to dream about the opposite sex without having to take these romantic feelings seriously, let alone act on them. In the dark, Natalie held Amanda's hand and lip-synched to Aaron Carter.
The last song of the afternoon was "The Hokey Pokey," which, the DJ explained to me, "adults don't care for." Of course adults (with the exception of my father, who wanted to join in until Natalie frantically waved him off) don't care for it; you wind up having to put your whole body in. What--Natalie and her friends were wondering--could that possibly consist of?
1. The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, David Shields, pg 19-20
2. Collier Schorr on Art:21 (PBS)