“Dad, did you ever see ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’?”
“I did. Two or three times. How’d you hear about it?”
“Dad.” Tween disdain. (Apparently The Kid’s older stepsister has played one of the characters, I think in a stage production; I picture her as Columbia. But of the details I’m ignorant.) “Where’d you see it?”
“Oh, it played in Stockton for years.” (After the film’s initial flop, United Artists’ 1976 West Coast midnight-movie release included cinemas up and down the Central Valley: Fresno, Merced, Modesto, Sacramento.) “In our sophomore year my Best Grammar School Friend snuck out of his house to see it. It seemed underground, dangerous. You couldn’t say that about much in Stockton.”
“Were you stoned when you saw it?”
“I know I was once.”
“What happened?”
“It’s kind of a long story. The Gingham & Cord dance. My only high school date. With that cute Lisa Galt.”
“Wait, what? I have to hear this.”
"I'll tell the short version."
"I want the long version."
The Kid’s interest in her parents’ pasts is long-standing. I get it: as a youth, I sucked up tales of my parents’ childhoods, amazed at such notions as my dad and his two brothers stealing a ride on the back of a trolley car. (A neighbor saw them; that night they were put in a tub, hit with a belt with a sharpened buckle so that, in my dad’s telling, the bath water was red with blood.) This was Oakland, Calif., in the 1930s; to my ears he might have been Huck Finn floating down the Mississippi.
The long version: In the late 1970s my family was involved with American Field Service (now AFS Intercultural Programs), a non-profit that sent students for summer- and year-long stays with families in foreign nations. Three of us kids spent time abroad; we also hosted a young woman from Yugoslavia, who remains one of my family’s closest friends. AFS activities were a staple of my adolescence. For a couple of years, every time we returned from a gathering, my mother uttered some variation of the sentence, “That Lisa Galt sure is cute.”
Lisa Galt (not her real name) lived in Lodi rather than north Stockton, attended Lodi High instead of Tokay, was in her junior year to my sophomore. Our only interactions were at AFS events, which her parents supported as enthusiastically as mine. Despite wishing to share as few as possible of my mom’s aesthetic judgments, I had to acknowledge that Lisa Galt was indeed cute: fresh-faced, athletic, with a shock of red hair cut, along with millions of American teens, in a Dorothy Hamill wedge. I’m not sure we’d ever shared more than a couple of sentences when she asked me to the Gingham & Cord.
Perhaps because so many were hosted by the Lodi Woman’s Club (don’t ask why the possessive is singular), dances at our high schools were mostly girl-ask-guy. The hook for the spring semester Gingham & Cord was that couples dressed alike. A couple of weeks before the dance, Lisa picked me up in a green Carmen Ghia (I was too young to drive; no one I knew spelled it Karmann) and we drove to the Weberstown Mall, where we spent maybe 10 minutes before deciding to buy matching white painter pants, azure jerseys.
I have no memory of this interaction, which including the drives must have taken an hour. Lisa and I must have been friendly, as I do remember looking forward to our date: my first. I was 15, pre-pubescent, 4’10”, less than 100 pounds, early stages of serious cystic acne. Evaluating my romantic self confidence would have assumed that I knew such a notion could be self-applied.
I did know I was going to have to impress her, so I prepared. For the intervening two weeks, I thought of amusing lines, jokes, bon mots. I collected at least a half-dozen, to be dispensed like time-release capsules to add wit and sparkle to our evening. I recall none of them, but I do recall rehearsing them during my pre-date shower.
Lisa picked me up. I believe we avoided photo sessions or any awkward meeting with my parents. Certainly I am aware of no photographic evidence. We had a reservation for a steakhouse, maybe in Stockton, maybe in Lodi. I know we had to wait for a table; I recall failing to secure a window table overlooking the water. I think I paid; she’d likely paid the club fee for the dance tickets. My main memory: before we were seated, I escaped to the restaurant’s bathroom in a panic. I’d run through every one of my witticisms, each received with stony silence. What would we say to each other for the next several hours? Good god.
As it turned out: Not much. We arrived for the dance — maybe at the Lodi High gym? — in a mood chilled to refrigerator level. Prospects of our sartorial selections being appreciated were immediately dimmed: more than a third of couples wore white painter paints and jerseys. Most popular jersey shade? Azure. Good god.
The worst was to come. I hadn’t thought it through, but I had no intention of dancing. I hadn’t attended a dance since middle school, when I had done little more than shuffle, hands gripped in finger-snap position (though no fingers were snapped), elbows pinned to rib cage, trying to hide in a gender-segregated group. A dance floor seemed as welcoming as a piranha-filled river. Lisa found a group of school friends whose male partners must have been equally reticent; the girls danced while I stood by myself, back to a wall.
A friend from my school's newspaper, a senior, swam into view with his girlfriend; they were sweating, smiling, impossibly carefree.
“Where’s your date?” he asked.
I pointed.
“What are you doing, man?”
“I have no idea.”
“You have to get out there!”
I gave my head a grim shake. Good god.
Not long after, when someone in Lisa’s group proposed we drive to Stockton to watch the midnight showing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," I practically fainted with relief. I’d seen it once, didn’t get the appeal — at 15, I appreciated neither musicals nor camp. Its frank sexuality titillated but also unnerved me. But anywhere was better than here. I sat in the back seat of the Carmen Ghia with another guy, while Lisa and her friend sat up front. The guy — I have almost no memory of him — produced a joint. I inhaled greedily. The girls declined.
I recall little about the movie, aside from the fact that Lisa and I sat apart. Her friend and friend’s date sat between us, for which I was grateful when he said, while Susan Sarandon’s character was having sex with the monster, “Where’s my Janet?” Good god.
I don’t know how her friends got home. I do recall how many words Lisa and I said to each other on the 20-minute ride home: zero. She pulled into my driveway; I opened the car door, said good night. Though we saw each other at subsequent AFS events, we never exchanged another word.
“Oh my god, Dad. Poor Lisa!"
“Yes. Poor Lisa.”
"You were a horrible, horrible date!”
"Without question. I’m not proud of it.”
“I hope you were better by the time you dated Mom. Or The Girlfriend.”
“You’d have to ask them. I like to think I’ve improved.”
In CoronaWorld such stories strike extra resonance. Not that The 12-year-old Kid is ready for the prom, but: When again will school dances, midnight movies be routine?
The Gingham & Cord, at least, is never coming back. Along with the Pigskin Prom, Lodi's fall girl-ask-guy dance, it was canceled in 2007, according to an unsigned commentary in the Lodi News-Sentinel that reads like it was written in 1957. Too much dirty dancing, apparently. I’d have been on the other side of that debate, cheering on any high school boy willing to step on a dance floor, much less grind.
(New York state numbers on Tuesday: 354,370 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.4 percent; 133 dead, to a total of 22.976, up 0.6 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,435, to a total of 85,656, up 1.7 percent.)
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