Last night I was dancing at a friend’s party. I danced as the DJ played music of all genres in English and Spanish. 80s freestyle? Of course. Con ganas, even. Cumbias? Con más ganas. I just kept on dancing up a storm with my friends. It was fun and the only way to keep warm on a cold night.

At one point toward the end of the evening, the DJ played “Un Puño de Tierra,” one of my favorite Ramón Ayala songs. Of course you can sit down, drink and sing along to such a song. But I wanted to keep on dancing. But it didn’t feel right. I needed to dance with someone.

No one offered to be my partner so I just held my arms up as if I did have a partner and kept on dancing. I hoped someone would notice. And someone did.

A cute guy — who I hadn’t even noticed at the party — grabbed my hands and we started dancing. We danced through “Rinconcito en el Cielo” and then took a break.

I like when wishful thinking comes through.

During a late night dinner in Little Tokyo we talked about the event we’d just been at, grad school and childhood. Well, I talked and he listened. It’s often like that when I’m around new friends. I give up all sorts of information and dominate the conversation out of fear of uncomfortable silences.

I don’t remember why I brought up childhood, but I did.

“I was a Girl Scout.”

That’s right. I was a Brownie in more ways that one. But before I sold my first box of Thin Mints in third grade, I was already a veteran of the typical suburban children’s activities. I’d played little league baseball, danced in a ballet folkórico group, sang in the Spanish and English language choirs at church and did nature-y and crafts-y things with the Girl Scouts. In high school, I focused on academics and band. I extended my band career to my first two years of college.

“What did you play?” he asked.

“Guess! No one ever guesses correctly on the first try.”

He looked at me for a moment before answering, “trombone.”

“You knew that already!” I said, assuming he’d seen that somewhere on my blog.

“No I didn’t,” he defended himself.

I continued talking more about my activity-filled childhood in Hacienda Heights.

“How long did you dance/play/sing/sell cookies?” he asked.

“A couple of years.”

“I get it. You do something for a few years and then move on.”

I was a slightly offended. He made the kid-teen version of me seem flaky. I explained that I stopped some activities because I aged out (Girl Scouts) or chose something else (band over folkórico). I’m glad I made those choices too. I had a fun childhood thanks to my parents who had the time and resources to support me and my siblings.

I was 19 the first time someone called me a flirt. I didn’t like it. At all.

At the time, I was taking a small seminar on Latinas in electoral politics with my friends Erika, Pato and Vane. Our reading for that week included several pieces in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, edited by Alma Gonzalez. The book was full of letters, speeches, articles and other historical documents from the 1960s and 70s. Although we weren’t assigned “A Chicana’s Message” — a one-page article originally published the January, 1972 issue of La Verdad — my peers still read the article. Here’s an excerpt from “A Chicana’s Message”:

The women who were at the [picnic] table were pregnant and I have gone through that torture. I have been on both sides of the fence. As women we have been pitted against each other for the big prize… el macho? We are constantly competing with one another, even when we walk down the street we are trying to hold our stomachs in or push our chi chi’s out. Believe me, that ain’t a very comfortable way to walk, but we do it. Since we’re little girls we’re taught to flirt; then we have boyfriends or get married and the men criticize us for being flirts — what do they expect? We are taught to use our bodies to get attention!

I don’t remember talking about the piece during class, but it came up during our walk back to the dorms. Erika was the first to draw the link between my behavior around our male friends and the article. Pato agreed too, but Erika was harsher in her criticism. According to her, my interactions weren’t friendly. They were shameless flirting and I was hungry for attention. She brought up examples of my flirting with one of our male peers in MEChA.

Okay, I was flirting, but that’s because I had a huge crush on the guy. I wasn’t about to admit that to them. So, I defended myself by linking my relationships with male friends to the kind of relationships I had with my cousins growing up. I grew up with a lot of male cousins. I had a lot of girl cousins too, but they were all too old or too young to play with. I ended up playing a lot of freeze tag and video games with my male cousins. I was accustomed to being around males. I told Erika and Pato that my friendliness with male friends was an extension of that. I wanted to feel the closeness and affection from my friends like I had with my family. Although it was all innocuous, Erika played it another way, “ugh, we don’t want to know what kind of attention you got from your cousins.”

Erika dropped the subject, as she could see I was getting more upset. But she wouldn’t let go of the topic all together.

The next year at our annual MEChA end-of-the-year dinner, she and a couple other women wrote up the gag awards. She presented most of the sarcastic and sometimes mean awards. People laughed, the award-winner blushed and then sat down at his seat.

For my award, Erika dragged up Jonathan, a mutual friend. He seemed embarrassed to read the paper, but she told him, “read it!”

He hesitated.

“Okay, the award for Most Likely to Flirt With the Presenter of this Award goes to Cindy.”

Besides having no coordination, I was a terribly shy nerd — and Mexican teenage girls simply can’t stand dorks.
– Gustavo Arellano in Orange County: A Personal History

I met Tony at the band beach party to celebrate the end of six weeks of summer school. Despite sitting just a few chairs away from each other in band class, I’d never spoken to him. We hit it off over Taboo at the beach, and became good friends. As often happens, I soon developed a crush which lasted through freshman year and part of sophomore year. During the summer, I invited him to my quinceañera. He showed up in a lime green shirt and dark green slacks. The green was too much on his lanky frame and clashed with his ruddy complexion, but I didn’t care.

Tony was clearly a dork. And I liked him.

Lori did my makeup that day. She always does my makeup when I want to look extra nice. This time, I was going to a wedding and I’d be seeing my ex as well as several old friends from college. Lori was busy with her own stuff that day and by the time she got to working on my face, it was already late. I left the house half an hour after I planned. As I drove to LA, I hoped that the bride and groom were doing the Mexican thing of misinforming guests about the ceremony start time. While the invitation read “Misa, dos de la tarde,” I hoped it was really “dos y media de la tarde.” This way, consistently tardy people like me end up arriving 15 minutes early rather than 15 minutes late.

I easily found the beautiful old Catholic church south of downtown. I slipped on my shoes, grabbed my camera and purse and walked toward the church. One of the bridesmaids and ushers was outside.

“Have they started?”

She shook her head.

I walked in through the side of the church and quickly looked around. The guests were scattered through the first 15 pews or so. The old school church wasn’t empty, but I’ve definitely seen more well-attended weddings. On the other side of the aisle, I saw the back of my ex’s easy to recognize head. He was sitting next to a mutual friend.

I nixed that pew and side of the church all together. Sitting next to the ex would be too awkward.

I scanned the church again looking for a safe spot. I stopped when I noticed G seated beside a long-haired woman at the end of an empty pew. I walked up toward the pew and then down toward G. As I neared her, I said, “Hey, G.” She turned and so did the long-haired woman.

G’s pew was not a safe spot. In my haste to find a seat, I failed to recognize that the long-haired woman was the ex-roommate. In worrying about seeing the ex, I forgot that the ex-roommate was also friends with the bride. Why wouldn’t she be at the wedding too?
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