Bumawitz, here. A couple weeks ago, some boy - a real cutie, according to my sister -...walked up to Sarah at a party and asked her to dance. For most sixth-graders, that would not be a problem. My daughter, though, has neither the time nor the need for boys. That is not the case with my niece, Shelby, a seventh-grader who walked into Sarah's birthday party in January and, in a state of shock, asked: "Hey, where's the boys?" Sarah and her close circle of friends would rather trash talk. Oh, yeah; kids are cruel. However, Sarah and her clutch of yentas do not talk trash about outsiders. A self-contained unit, they shamelessly trash-talk each other - in front of each other. The practice leads to great despair, but, amazingly, it always is short-lived. The bickering, it seems, is more disconcerting to people who observe the verbal clashes. Actually, this has nothing to do with their anti-social behavior. It has to do with my anti-social behavior. Junior high dances terrified me. As the ugly, fat kid in a group of real cuties, -...as my sister would say - I was just lost. The thought of walking up to a girl -...looking hot in shiny, black Mary Janes and a bouncy dress with poofy sleeves (and a beehive hairdo if it happened to be the Christmas dance) left me paralyzed by fear. Still, I dutifully attended every late 1960s dance at Ramsay Junior High, hugging the wall and slamming down bottle after 10-cent bottle (not counting the 2 cent deposit) of Mountain Dew. And that's all I did. My best friend spent days before each dance trying to bolster my ego. The therapy was primitive. "Just dance," said my friend, whose hair would not become mussed in a hurricane. "With who?" I moaned. "Who's going to dance with me?" "Anybody," he countered. "Nobody's gonna turn you down. They all want to dance." "Yeah, with guys like you," I said. "I know what I look like." "You're asking them to dance, not to get married, you ass," the amateur psychologist said - without a hint of compassion or empathy. He ran off a list of his girlfriends de jour. "I'll talk to her. She'll talk to them. She'll fix it up for you," he said. "No. You do that and I won't go at all," I threatened. "I don't want charity." Those conversations always exhausted me and never served their intended purpose. It was even worse with my mother, a social butterfly who attended 29 proms before she graduated from high school. Without fail, I returned from each dance devastated by my social shortcomings and emotionally ruined by the experience. Delicately wielding a Pall Mall - "pell mell" to her - between two fingers, she painfully asked, "How was the dance?" "Not good," I answered, dreading the rest of the conversation. "Did you dance?" she continued, the gray ash of her unfiltered cigarette growing longer by the second and bowing under its own weight. "No, I didn't dance," I responded sarcastically. "I'm a biiiiig failure." "You are not," she said. "Any little girl would be honored to dance with a nice, polite boy like you." "Who are you looking at?" I shot back. "Nobody wants to dance with me. Fat guys don't dance." Then she cried and I ran around the block - as if one circuit would render the fat from my body and transform me into Ricky Nelson. It never worked. One Friday night, though, at my last junior high dance, fear lost. I went to Ramsay on a mission, and after just four hours, approached the best looking eighth-grader in the school. She was a pal -...in a comfortable nonboyfriend-girlfriend sort of way. At first, the words stuck inside. "What's up?" she asked, chewing Fruit Stripe gum, as always. "Uh, you wanna dance?" I croaked. "Ok," she answered matter-of-factly and headed onto the gym floor. So we danced, to "High on a Hill," by Scott English, and then to "Smile a Little Smile for Me," by The Flying Machine. With that, the dance ended. "See ya Monday," she said, and walked away. I managed only a limp-wristed wave. Badly in need of a Mountain Dew, Bumawitz, out. Bumawitz also is known as City Editor Joe Abramowitz.

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