Big Hair, Parachute Pants, and other Signs of Peer Pressure

So, Katie experienced her first break-up with a friend. Well, not so much of a break-up as a continental drift...her friend drifted from their little Omega geek world into the bigger world of complex social strata and is aiming for being a part of the popular group. And really, who can blame her. In the world of a thirteen year old, it's hard to hear you're hanging with the loser crowd. Katie and her other friends have shrugged and wished her well, though they are somewhat dismayed to find their numbers down by one. Their group doesn't know - at least not yet - how to play the right games to blend in with the larger herd. They don't care for fake affections or pretended interests. For now, they say they prefer it that way, and hopefully they really do...still...peer pressure is a fearsome thing at this age, especially when there are members of the opposite sex involved.

It seems fitting that I would have heard this story while I had a group of girls at the roller skating rink. Almost poetic justice in that, as another roller rink, in a distant galaxy, far far away...was the scene of so many of my own moments of peer pressure buckling. See, I was a child of the 1980's, and Friday night meant hanging out at the roller rink. It was awesome - I had the the classic white skate boots with the big pink pom poms on them - all the right footwear to go with my parachute pants, my feathered hair, and my off-one-shoulder tops. Height of tacky, and I looked just like everyone else. The Duran Duran hat came a little bit later, with the acid washed jeans and the asymetrical punk haircut....

Friday night at the roller rink meant a little bit of skating and a whole lot of posturing, flirting and sometimes making out. The rink where I take my girls is so much the same, and yet so different. Same carpeted benches and open lockers, but a lot better lighting and a lot more adults looking out on the action. So, maybe it's a good thing - the rink I frequented as an adolescent had no doors on the bathroom stalls to cut down on sex and drug use. Eek. Not a memory I want anywhere close to my own girls....but anyway...I did neither of those two things while I was at the rink, and didn't know anyone personally who did. Maybe it was just one of those urban legends. But the smell of the rink - slight sweat, greasy pizza, popcorn, and some undefinable smell that is only found in those old rinks - it was the same. It took me back to being thirteen years old and trying to figure out where I fit into the social structure as well.

My biggest peer pressure moment could be summed up with two words - Brian Dantona. Brian looked like Michael J. Fox (and that was a big deal in the early 80's), and he danced like Michael Jackson. OK, so he was kind of on the short side...who cared...he was Brian Dantona. Even his name was awesome. There are kids like him that we all know growing up - legends in their own time, for no reason other than that they possess that undefinable quality of "cool" that has all the girls wanting them and all the boys wanting to be them. Brian didn't go to my school - heck, not sure really how old he was or if he went to school. Didn't matter - he was Brian Freaking Dantona. Brian didn't have girlfriends for periods of days or weeks. He had Friday night girls, and he had his own spot on the mushroom shaped benches in the darkest corner of the rink. On any given Friday night, you could see a random girl sitting next to him - or on his lap, if she was lucky enough to be shorter than him - making out. Never mattered which girl, because we all pretty much looked alike. It was a girls' rite of passage to make-out with Brian Dantona. I'd made it through 7th grade and most of the summer before 8th without being one of Brian's Friday night girls. That summer I had a major crush on another guy, Andy - not so much of a legend, but still a pretty great guy. He raced dirt bikes, and he'd almost gotten up the nerve to kiss me one Saturday in a friend's treehouse. So, the next Friday night I dressed with extra care - plastering my feathered layers into place, putting on the palest glittery lip gloss, wearing my very coolest new shirt and the tightest jeans I owned - the ones I had to lay down to zip and pray I wouldn't need to pee. I figured I wouldn't even bother with skates until I was sure Andy was coming. In the way that things always seem to go when you are a teenager, that was the night I got the message from one of the other boys that Brian "oh My God" Dantona wanted me to come sit with him.

Now, I knew I'd been waiting for over a year for my turn. Not because I really wanted to make-out with Brian Dantona, but because I didn't want to be the girl he never asked. But in that moment, I was wavering, because I really just wanted to hang out by the snack bar and see if Andy would show up and maybe ask me to couples skate again. But my friends were all waiting, and Julie gave me a little push forward and asked, "what are you WAITING for?" in a pretty shrill voice. I'd like to say that I used all my common sense (because thirteen year old girls are known for that), and said "no." But I didn't. All these girls were looking at me expectantly, wondering what my problem was, and the speakers were pounding out REO Speedwagon, and I just sort of fog-walked over to the darkest corner and sat down with Brian Dantona. I spent the next two hours as Brian's Friday night girl, pretty much bored out of my mind, until the moment I opened my eyes and looked past Brian's blow-dryed perfection hair and saw Andy couples skating with Lynn. I tried to throw myself back into my legendary make-out moment, but my heart wasn't in it and quite frankly, my lips had gone numb by that time.

My friends all congratulated me as we waited in the parking lot for our rides, Brian having walked away at closing time, without so much as ever having said anything beyond "Hi" and "Thanks, see ya'." Andy walked to the other end of the parking lot to wait for his car. He never did speak to me again. I had a choice between a really great guy, or doing what was expected by my friends. I went with what was expected of me, because it was easier to privately hurt about Andy than to explain why on earth I wouldn't make-out with the guy that all the girls wanted.

I had forgotten all about those Friday nights and Brian Dantona until I was sitting in the rink watching my girls go round and round under the disco lights, and was thinking about what they had told me regarding friends and popularity. Who even really knows what it means to be popular or even to "belong," but we were all so afraid of not having that indefinable quality, we were willing to risk a part of who we were. Most of the time I'm so proud of my daughter and her friends for not caring what other people think and going down their own paths. Other times, I'm scared for them. It's hard to be the outcast - we moved around a lot when I was a kid, and I've walked both paths. I do try to help Katie find a balance - you can be yourself without being an out and out curiosity. I hope every single day that she'll make good choices. But if one day she has her own Brian Dantona moment, because just for one single Friday night she wants to be one of the girls...I'll understand, and I'll try to help her understand if her friends make that same kind of decision.