You just never know. You look through your email Inbox, you see messages you must have overlooked, they have attachments, you open them...and all hell breaks loose.

Ladies and gentlemen, for your point-and-laugh enjoyment...I present 17 Year Old Don Wood...TAPDANCING!

(see these images from my previous blog here)

These abominations come to you courtesy of a Ms. K. Ryan, who was "kind" enough to send them to me after finding them in a box in her garage. I could identify a few of the lovely young ladies in the photos, but I'll be a gentleman and leave them their dignity.

I had never done any dancing beyond a fourth grade P.E. unit involving Square Dancing and The Hustle, so it was a big hurdle, but I had great teachers, some of whom are standing in these photos. Our high school drama teacher had been one of the Jets in the West Side Story movie, as well as in Hello Dolly and a bunch of others before he got drafted for Viet Nam and barely survived being shot out of the sky in a helicopter while serving with the special forces. I took drama as an easy language arts credit, but ended up staying around and eventually auditioning to be in the nonsense captured above just because I was so compelled by this teacher. Here, suddenly, was an adult in the suburbs of Denver that had actually lived his life in the world instead of a hamster wheel, and somehow still managed to treat the teenagers around him with more dignity than the Eloi/Morlok paradigm we got most of the time.

You can see, above, how cavalier one can be with dignity so dearly earned...