When your parents join you at the frat party

A gray-haired man in aviator glasses, a Hawaiian shirt and ill-fitting black jeans grapevined as will.i.am asked, "What you gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?" A fifty-five-year-old woman with an ill-layered blond bowl cut, plastic glasses and a fanny pack did the twist as she mouthed, "It's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes. I am getting so hot, I wanna take my clothes off." A pink and blond preying mantis of a man, holding a Campari with orange juice, bent his knees and head to the rhythm of, "You know it's hard out here for a pimp when he trying to get his money for the rent." To "Summer of '69," which the DJ played twice (ah, Sameena, this is dedicated to you), a woman with a frizzed rope of brown and silver hair attempted West Coast swing with a squat man in hipster bowling shoes and your grandfather's short-sleeved light blue shirt tucked hospital-sheet tight into pleated khakis.

My friends and I stood on the sidelines of the Canadian Club's patio-turned-dance floor. Behind us a pool lay still and empty. Balloons and strings of lights hung above the makeshift bar. The moon, pale and almost full, hovered just above the line of trees that concealed the razor-wired wall. (If you went to college with me, think Colonial Club in the waning days of its heyday, just before the evangelical coup. Otherwise, think wedding reception at the Cleveland, Ohio, Sheraton.)

There were all the signs it was time to go to another party. Except there wasn't another party -- not that night and not on any other night. This was the only party, over and over and over again.

I have a well-practiced ability to sit on that narrow and dangerously safe perch of ironic detachment. At sad movies, when I begin to feel upset, I quickly shift to a consideration of how the film does the work of manipulating my emotions. When I watch a tragedy unfold on television, as soon as the suffering begins to sicken me, I analyze the news media's presentation of the event. When I go to a museum, I imagine the artist choosing colors. When I attend a performance, I guess the intentions of the choreographer or director. And so, I could keep with these inclinations by smiling smugly to conceal my shyness and desperate desire to dance. Or, if just for a few hours, I could just be. I could live inside myself for once. I could listen to music without an awareness of all the labels and constraints that accompany my acquired sensibilities and my sense of my own, already somewhat shattered, identity.

Things were going well. My friends and I invented new dances and nursed the gin and juice. We pretended the DJ hadn't already played several of the songs. We were rude, in the most Western way, to the boys who came to grind, in the most Western way, behind us (Boy: "Is this all you got for me?" Us: "Go away." Boy: "Come on! Show me some more!" Us: "Go away." Boy: "I could show you a lot more." Me: "Please don't.") And then, at the end of the night, when we were drenched in sweat and hoarse from singing, the dj spun "Gold Digger," a song that apparently hasn't gotten any radio play outside the U.S. All the Europeans and Asians stopped dancing and looked confused and watched as I, in full rap-operatic mode, belted out, "If you fuckin' with this girl, then you better be paid. You know why. It takes too much to touch her. From what I heard she got a baby by Busta. My best friend say she used to fuck with Usher. I don't care what none of y'all say, I still love her."