Thursday night, Dylan asked for money so he could go to an after-school dance on Friday afternoon. This took me back a bit, given that last year he’d sworn off the dances, complaining that they only played rap music. Nevertheless, I am more prone to encourage my son to interact with his peers than discourage it, so I gave him the money.

Yesterday, in one of his rare talkative moods, he offered up a morsel about the dance. “Well, I reckon that DJ from the dance is going to lose his job.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Mom, these kids were just walking up to him and handing him their cd’s and he was playing them—they weren’t the edited versions so there was a lot of bad language and drug references and stuff.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “sounds like he will get in some trouble over that. Was it all rap music again at the dance?”

“Uh huh—well, they did play one AC/DC song. That was cool.”

“Let me guess—it was ‘Back in Black’?”

“Yeah. Other than that, it was pretty much rap music.”

“So what did you do then?”

He looked at me as if my brain were oozing from my ears. “Uh…Mom…it’s called a DANCE because people, I know this is going to sound crazy, but they DANCE…so…I…DANCED.”

I looked at my son, my gangly, often clumsy and always awkward, oh-so-white son, doing my best to envision him moving to the sounds of loud, pulsing, angry rap music. “Let me get this straight—you were dancing to rap music?”

“Uh huh—a bunch of us were. We just get in a group and dance together.”

“And just how is it that you dance, Dylan?”

It was then that he cracked a smile, that subversive little grin when I know the dam is just about to break, that the river of information is about to start flowing more naturally and I am about to get closer to the truth.

“Well, Mom, they play rap music…and they play it really, really loud…so we get in a big group and…well, we square dance.”

Man, I love that kid.