Deeper Fun

Once, I wrote a piece about wedding receptions and about the idea of being forced to have fun -- about how distasteful I find that. (And boy, was I sorry about the title, after the number of unsavory sites that linked to me. There must have been a lot of disappointed mouse-wielding perverts out there that week. They must have felt like they had been "Rick-Rolled".)  Anyway, I was thinking about this again, only with a sharper dissection knife.

The great Gene Krupa

I don't like to dance. I have nothing against dancing or against those who enjoy the activity -- I just don't find it fun. Now, here's the problem: People who enjoy dancing enjoy it so much that they want everyone around them to enjoy it. If you claim that you don't like to dance or that you do not want to dance, the people who like to dance (as sure about the universal joy that dancing brings as the missionaries were about the salvation they were bringing in to the South American jungles regardless of the heedless destruction of indigenous culture) try to pull you onto the floor. It is, to them, their duty to show you the fun you are missing.

Forced Fun

Brueghel: "Peasant Dance"

I hate wedding receptions. There. I've said it. I loathe them. I'd rather scrape my cheek against a stucco wall and submerge my head in salt water than go to a wedding reception.

I know. I'm a stick-in-the-mud. Blah, blah, blah. I've heard it before. I'm a stuffed shirt because I don't want to do the chicken dance. I'm a curmudgeon because I don't want to join a conga-line and follow a half-witted dj around the room as he bleats through his cheap PA system about how much fun we are all having. I'm a prude because I don't want to reach up a strange woman's dress to put a garter on her thigh as a room full of orangutans yells "Woooooooo!"