Who is Charlie Conti? Read Free Page A

track by a Swedish band so that overfed Americans can jiggle around and get off on some sanitized idea of their own folk heritage. But at Happy Lives they get a real kick out of it. Suddenly the chairs in the garden were all empty and the dancing area in front of the tent was crowded with kids having a blast. I mean, technically they were pretty lousy dancers, bouncing up and down and doing these corny moves, and being out of time and all. This one kid was swinging his arms like some crazy windmill, but I had to hand it to them, they really were having fun. And then I realized what I should do: I should take Izzy’s hand and dance with her in the middle of the dance floor, right in the middle of all her friends. I mean, I know she tells her friends about me, and that she’s pretty proud of me in her way.Boy, would she get a kick out of me and her dancing along to
Cotton Eyed Joe
.
    But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. I usually have to be pretty smashed before I can dance anyway, and even then I don’t know if I could dance to
Cotton Eyed Joe
. Maybe it would’ve been easier if Martin hadn’t been there. But I felt too embarrassed. And the worst thing was, I didn’t even know what I was embarrassed of. Of being a lousy dancer? Not really – I’m fine with that. Of not having as much fun as everyone else? Well, maybe a little bit. But the more I thought about it, the more embarrassed I got. In fact, I felt embarrassed about being embarrassed. Sometimes it’s not good to think about stuff too much.
    I told Izzy to go and dance and that we would watch her. She bounced onto the dance floor holding hands with two of the girls who had been helping her arrange the records. The third girl went to stand next to the tent, to the side of the dancing area. She was wearing a New England Patriots shirt which was pretty big for her, and a strange choice too. She wasn’t dancing but I saw that Izzy and the other two girls on the dance floor kept looking across at her and waving and the girl in the football shirt smiled and waved back and seemed to be having fun in her way.
    All the tables in the garden were empty now, so Martin and I sat down at one of them. To tell you the truth, I was starting to feel pretty down. What’s the point of being educated and normal and all if you can’t just have fun when a dumb song comes on and all the time you know you could have made someone really happy? From where I was sitting I could see Izzy on the dance floor, bouncing up and down opposite the crazy windmill guy andoccasionally looking across to see if I was still watching. She really was having a blast.
    At Belmont I had a Philosophy teacher called Mr. Rowland-Smith . He was very old and kind of bent – I mean physically – but he was a pretty funny guy all the same. He never got pissed or raised his croaky old voice, but man, did he know how to cut you down to size. You didn’t want to mess with old Rowland-Smith or he’d make you the butt of some pretty sharp jibes. Except it wasn’t so much the jibes themselves that hurt, it was more that he’d get the whole class laughing at you, even your buddies. The other thing about Rowland-Smith, he used to repeat a couple of phrases the whole time. His favourite was: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Boy, did he love that phrase. I guess sometimes it was applicable, like if you were asking about why you should bother with Ancient Greek and Philosophy and stuff, but he used to use it
all
the time. Anyway, I wished old Rowland-Smith could’ve seen Izzy having a blast with that crazy windmill guy. She looked so happy, she really did. But as for me, sitting on the white plastic chairs with Martin,
examining
it all, I really felt that my whole way of looking at stuff was wrong and that maybe
my
life was not worth living. I know that sounds kind of dramatic, but I couldn’t help thinking how simple it should be to go and dance with her and yet I couldn’t do it. Like I