Dixie Derek

It was a Monday afternoon, and what always seemed to be the longest school day of the week had finally ended. I trudged over to my car, barely resisting the urge to drag my loaded backpack through the mud, as I absentmindedly hummed my favorite country tune with a slight smile. My friend Hank and I would be going to the Dixie Chicks concert in a few short hours, the excitement of which was in many respects the only reason I’d made it through the day without having a minor stress-related breakdown. I’d drummed along to “Goodbye, Earl” with a pencil on my desk all through math, and earlier had doodled guitars and cowboy boots all over the cover of my French binder while my classmates recited that week’s kitchen vocabulary words. All in all, it hadn’t been the greatest day.
In the car a few minutes later, I was just pulling around the upper school pickup circle when I had to slam on my brakes to avoid a collision with my English teacher, Mr. Gottlieb, who was jogging to his car. “Where the heck does he need to be in such a rush?” I asked my steering wheel angrily, watching him pull out of campus while I found myself stuck behind some giggling freshmen girls walking very slowly to the gym.
Seven o’clock rolled around before I knew it, and Hank and I found ourselves at the Pepsi Center, sitting amongst the concert’s chatting crowd, taking pictures of ourselves in our cowboy hats and voicing our unbearable excitement. As the stadium darkened and the concert began, we screamed along with every song and busted moves of the variety normally found in videos on TV that mothers have sent in of their daughters dancing in the privacy of their bathrooms while singing into hairbrushes, oblivious to the camera lens poking through the crack in the door. I was having a great time, and as I sat down to catch my breath 15 minutes in I was glad that nobody I knew could see me acting like a doofus in my dark seat. It was then that I noticed him.
“Hey,” I said, elbowing Hank in the ribs. “Look at that crazy man down there.”
“Where?” he asked, scanning the crowd.
“Down there,” I pointed.
“Oh….Oh my god!”
We both laughed, forgetting the stage and our own dancing as we stared transfixed at the man on the floor below us in a bright orange t-shirt. He was dancing along to what was a relatively slow song as though warding off a horde of invisible bats swarming around his face, screaming at the top of his lungs and occasionally clapping his hands together in delight. His friend to his right was chuckling in apparent embarrassment as the man jumped and twirled in circles, and though his neighbors had squeezed together to give him extra room he still managed to hit a few of them in the face with his flailing arms. His outrageous enthusiasm and closed eyes reminded me forcibly of people I’d seen in videos of audiences of large church functions, in which certain members were possessed by the holy spirit mid-sermon and lost control of their limbs as they basked rapturously in God’s glory. As he threw his arms up to the ceiling and yelled, “You always said the day that you would leave me…would be a cold day in Juuuuuulyyyyyy!” I caught a glimpse of his face.
“Oh my God, Hank!” I yelled, grabbing his arm. “It’s Mr. Gottlieb!”
“No way. That guy’s too old.”
It was true that the man was standing just a bit too far away for positive confirmation, but my faith told me to stick with my gut instinct.
“That’s definitely him,” I said. Hank might not have believed me, but as far as I was concerned there was no mistaking his face or the specific way he stood in his seat. I’d just discovered my English teacher singing in the bathroom – the only thing I was missing was my video camera.
Mr. Gottlieb’s enthusiasm took a hold of me. The rest of the concert was punctuated by my occasional request of Hank to “Look at Derek,” to which he usually smirked but didn’t really respond. I, however, stopped watching the stage completely after awhile and simply stared at the man, who seemed to have a different dance move for each song. I tried a few of them out myself, including one I have since named “the octopus,” which involved a lot of arm action and earned me a few snide comments from the middle aged women sitting behind me. At the end of every song, Derek would blow large, exaggerated kisses at the stage, using both arms and lots of jumps up and down as though this added boost would propel the kisses directly over the heads of the crowd and straight to Natalie and the Chicks themselves. I was trying it out for myself when I accidentally hit Hank in the back of the head, and when I was through apologizing and looked back to Derek, he was gone.
Panicking, I scanned the crowd in a frenzy, looking for orange, only to discover after a few moments later that he was still in his seat, jumping up and down as usual except that he had taken his shirt off and was waving it above his head while desperately singing along to “Landslide.”
“Oh, Mr. Gottlieb,” I laughed.

I woke up early the next day and made it a point to get to school on time, which was very unusual for a Tuesday. I sat down in English class, ready to be regaled with stories of Mr. Gottlieb’s amazing night while I’d smile to myself and nod understandingly, but he mentioned no such thing and instead began the lesson with a reading quiz. By 8:20, when he’d failed to comment on my Dixie Chicks t-shirt or even give an excuse for not having finished grading our essays better than “I didn’t get around to it last night,” I knew something was dreadfully wrong. Could Mr. Gottlieb be ashamed of his passion for my favorite soul-singing country band? Did the t-shirted man with no shame of the night before transform in the light of day into the necktied teacher who stood before me? Should I out him to the class?
I had decided to wait and see, when a student knocked on the door, late and locked out of the room. Somebody let him in, and I was just deciding to leave the concert issue alone when Mr. Gottlieb cracked a joke about how he was surprised to see the incoming student late while Ali Hursh had made it on time. He’d gone too far.
“Oh, you’ve got nothing on me, Mr. Gottlieb,” I said to myself, smiling. “You just wait…”