Move, Everybody.

Last week I promised a blog entry about Elijah’s dance class, Everybody Move. The near deafening lack of request for the subject matter from all 8 HamannEggs readers really has me charged about the subject.

Everybody Move is taught at the Evanston dance center. It’s nestled in a strip mall between a Christian book store and a clearly drug front clothing store that features baseball hats with messages spelled out in rhinestones like, “Beat” and “Street.”

Eli and I arrived at class and removed our jackets. The class features a padded ramp and some other padded mats. In the center of the room stood a Medieval torture contraption. It looked like two wooden ladders precariously leaning together to form an inverse V. Before I could ask the moms in attendance if this was used to punish bad children, the aging hippie teacher arrived.

Eli began saying, “Ju? Ju?”

I said, “Yeah. I guess she’s Jewish. But that’s not cool, man...”

I then realized the aging hippie was pouring juice into Dixie cups on a nearby table. She covered the cups with a tie-dyed cloth and said, “That’s for later.” For the rest of the class, various teams of children attempted to scale the table to no avail.

The class was essentially the hippie playing fun songs surrounded by small carpet squares. The children would sit for a moment and then tear off to climb, then fall off the Medieval contraption or try to pole vault onto the juice table.

There were props and dancing and I sang along so loudly that the other mothers looked at me like I was Eli’s “special” older brother. Sometime during class Ryan, the cute girl Eli ignores showed up with her mom. Eli did his best to not pay any attention to them.

Finally, the hippie announced class was over and began to hand out juice cups. This was the only time the class actually paid attention. They sat on the carpet squares quietly like little yogis.

It broke my heart a little to see him drinking from a real cup. I prayed he would dump it onto himself and stay a baby. But he held his cup out to the aging hippie and said, “More Ju? Pee (please)?”

Today’s picture has nothing to do with dancing. But check out his huge paws on that steering wheel. He could knock out a buffalo with fists like those.