Texas

There was a lovely piece in the Wall Street Journal called "Freaked Out: Teens' Dance Moves Split a Texas Town". I like the Journal very much; it's beautifully-written, pithy, intelligent, and (on the news pages at least) fairly neutral. Now that it's going to be part of News Corp I'm a little worried. Do we have horoscopes? Bingo? Maybe not. Anyway , this article (and I won't give you a link, you have to be a paid subscriber to read the WSJ) starts...


ARGYLE, Texas -- Karen Miller, 53 years old, saw her first "freak dance" four years ago when she was chaperoning a high-school dance attended by her freshman daughter.
One boy was up close to a girl's back, bumping and grinding to the pounding beat of the music.
"I thought, 'That's just dadgum nasty,'" Ms. Miller recalls. "It really had me sick to my stomach."

And that's where I stopped cold, a sharp intake of breath. Dadgum? It's almost beyond parody. I've never been to Texas but I've always wanted to go. I was once offered a scholarship to do grad school at Rice and was very sorely tempted. I sometimes wonder how I would have turned out if I'd spent those few years in Houston; I suspect it would have been good for me.