I went through a Charlie Brown phase when I was a kid. 

I tried sports, but wasn’t very good. Boy Scouts intrigued me, but I could never fish as well as the other guys or learn to tie a knot very well.  

Sure, there were other guys in the same boat as me, but when you are a kid, you tend to think you are the only one who suffers from awkwardness. It seemed like I had a perpetual stream of bad luck.  

I’m not sure I ever got out of that Charlie Brown phase.

I never got a rock for Halloween, so there’s that.

One of the things that I always looked forward to was being around my own “little redheaded girl.”  

Like Charlie, I fancied a girl or two who made my pulse race and who I thought were the epitome of female pulchritude.

Most girls at that age looked at us guys like we were stinky and greasy gas machines. We were the same guys who made rude sounds with our armpits and blew snot rockets at recess.

But the place I knew that I would have fleshly contact with the girls was PE class.  Every day during seventh hour, we would head down to the gym and participate in all kinds of co-ed activities.

However, the favored activity to have the most contact with females was one of the activities that we all pretended to hate:  square dancing.

I loved square dancing, and during a class reunion one year, most of my buddies admitted the same.  

And we all liked it for the same reason: Dancing with Julie.

All us guys wanted to dance with Julie. She was petite, bubbly and pretty.  She smelled nice, and was one of the nicest girls we knew.

When we were in Kindergarten and first grade, Julie had been the “kissing girl.” These days, she would be given an in-school suspension, but in the mid-1970s, she chased boys down on the playground, caught them, and kissed them.

None of us ever ran as fast as we could have.

We probably all wished Julie hadn’t given up the vocation of her early elementary recesses, but she was now just a nice girl.  Pretty girl. Former “kissing girl.”

Still, we hoped we’d get a chance to do-si-do with her or “roll away to half sashay” with her.

A lot of the time, us taller boys wound up dancing with Susan, who was the tallest girl in class and taller than most of us boys. She was a nice girl, but she was imposing and could have easily knocked us all silly with one hand tied behind her back.

So when we danced with her, we let her take the lead.

But even worse than dancing with Susan was having to dance with the PE teacher. Some of us even had to dance with the male PE teacher if too many people were absent.  

That was the worst, and thankfully, it didn’t happen very much.

I always ended up dancing with Mrs. B, the female PE teacher. She was a nice enough lady, but nobody  wanted to square dance with their PE teacher. It was just about as “Charlie Brownesque” as one could get.

So with a slightly purplish-red face and putting on a brave smile, I would swing Mrs. B. around the dance floor, allemande left with her when needed, and sometimes promenade across the floor with her.  

She seemed to appreciate how gallant I was.  

It was always a relief to go back to one of my funny female friends, like Jessica or Lynn, who were both like one of the guys and who could do armpit farts better than any of us.  I think Jessica won the snot rocket contest numerous times.

And I still hold on to that night at the Elks Club when about half-a-dozen guys admitted to loving square dancing.

True, happy hour had been going on for a while, but I still trust that all confessions were heartfelt.