Skate Night Is Back and It's Still Gloriously Chaotic
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The beginning of each school year brings with it the return of many familiar rituals and events, but perhaps none is more important than Elementary School Skate Night.
If you’re not familiar with Skate Night—maybe they don’t have it in your area, and if that is the case, I am deeply sorry—allow me a moment to explain. Skate Night is a fundraising event that puts the “FUN” in fundraising (and also the broken bones). It’s typically hosted by the school’s PTA at a local skating rink between the hours of, say, 6 and 8:30 p.m. Students and families gather at Skate Night to roller skate for a couple of hours, shout the lyrics to Party in the U.S.A. by Miley Cyrus, and do the Cha Cha Slide on roller skates, which is an objectively perfect idea. In retrospect, an explanation probably wasn’t all that necessary. I’m sure you could’ve figured it out for yourself.
The first Skate Night of the year is always the most heavily attended because summer vacation allows time for parents to recharge and become ever so slightly less dead inside. When the calendar turns to August, parents everywhere are like, “Yes, this is the year I don’t give up on trying by October first.” (Spoiler alert: For 95% of us, this is not the year that happens. In fact, no year is.) Because the first Skate Night is so popular, it slots into a solid second place on my annual social calendar right behind Meet the Teacher Day. What does that mean functionally? I put a bit of gel in my hair and don one of my fancy t-shirts with buttons at the collar leaving the top button undone to project an aura of effortless style and grace. To maintain an air of mystery and nonchalance, I don’t skate. This also helps keep my limb bones intact.
Elementary School Skate Night is uniquely entertaining because small children have such a wide range of skating abilities and experience levels. For example, one little boy with a baseball cap turned backward and long, flowing blond hair that danced on his shoulders as he zigged and zagged around the rink at ridiculous speeds looked ready to compete in the X Games next week. I could easily picture him doing a TV interview where he used the words “sick” and “gnarly.” Meanwhile, tens or hundreds of other children shuffled along, moving at the pace of glaciers before global warming really kicked in, their halting, exceedingly careful movements interspersed with terrifying and unpredictable spasms of legs and arms that resembled Scooby Doo characters trying to escape a ghost. One such flailing arm episode happened when I was walking along the edge of the rink. A small boy rolled in front of me on the carpet and one of his little windmilling fists happened to make direct contact with my groin area. Several parents noticed and laughed like, “Classic!” It was the perfect comedic bit. You just never know what kind of hijinks Skate Night will produce.
Parents are also fun to observe at Skate Night because while most are bored or catatonic or extremely nervous or a little weepy or barely there like shadows at dusk, a select few have clearly been training and dreaming about this night their entire lives. For them, Skate Night isn’t just a night for fun and/or misery, it’s a night to shine! A few years ago, I imagined how the school might respond to such spotlight-hogging parents. You can read that here or just have a quick look at this excerpt to get a general idea.
Dear Babbling Brook Elementary Families!!
It’s that time of year again. Our first Skate Night has arrived! Please join us next Tuesday at Slippery Slope Skateway for a fun-tastic night of roller skating, quality family time, and most importantly, skating like normal Babbling Brook parents and not trying to recreate Olympic Gold Medalist Brian Boitano’s signature Tano triple lutz.
That’s right! Skate Night is one of the highlights of the school calendar. The children love it and the parents love stepping back in time and re-living a little piece of their childhood! Sure, plenty has changed since you were carefree children gliding around the skating rink, bopping out to Don’t Turn Around by the incomparable Ace of Base, but it’s nice to remember, isn’t it!
You’re still way behind on your mortgage, your back is a mess, and you could stand to lose fifty pounds or so, and no Chad, we are not singling you out with that comment just because you are busting out of that reproduction of the blue and gold military-themed unitard that Brian Boitano wore for his free skate at the 1988 Calgary Olympics.
After an unfortunate but not unexpected beverage spill on the rink caused a temporary skating suspension ten minutes before closing time, the rink DJ closed the night by playing vampire by Olivia Rodrigo. Let me tell you, that track brought the house down. I have to say, though, that the lyrics “Blood sucker, fame (word that starts with F and rhymes with sucker)” sure hit different when they are scream-sung in unison by a horde of 9-year-old girls on roller skates. I’m sure the version of the song the DJ was spinning was edited, but still. Florida has developed a puritanical reputation lately, with good reason, but I think it’s always been, like, a super fake puritanism that conceals the true driving factors behind the political heel turn: hypocrisy, opportunism, and stupidity. In other words, Floridians still know how to Party in the U.S.A. when we want to. And when we want to is typically Elementary School Skate Night.
At any rate, our first Skate Night of the year was a rousing success in no small part because my kids sat around for at least half the time waiting for friends to arrive, so they had much less time to injure themselves. We escaped unscathed. At least physically (if you don’t count my groin). However, that vampire song and Chad’s catastrophic triple-lutz attempt will probably be haunting my dreams for quite some time.