Mark KennedyI was sorting laundry last week when I came across the oddest thing.
My 13-year-old son had somehow wormed out of a dress shirt and necktie without unbuttoning his collar or untying his tie. It looked as if somebody had melted, Wicked-Witch-of-the-West style, inside our laundry hamper.
Although I had demonstrated to my son how to tighten his tie, I hadn’t specifically taught him how to reverse the process. So he improvised, and the dismount must have been painful. I can just see him yanking off his shirt, pulling it over his head and emerging with red ears and wide eyes, as if to say, “Yowsa! That can’t be right.”
The occasion of my son donning a shirt and tie in the first place was Junior Cotillion, a dance and etiquette course for Chattanooga area seventh-graders. For four Sundays in January, we carpooled to the DoubleTree hotel in downtown Chattanooga, where we were careful to stay outside — parents being radioactive to 13-year-olds.
Inside the hotel, about 200 boys and girls learned table manners, how to write thank-you notes, how to introduce themselves, and how to execute several ballroom dance steps. The boys wore ties and blazers. The girls wore party dresses, and, for reasons that are still unclear to me, all appeared to be about two years older than the guys.