Dancing tots heat up the 4 train

After dinner with a friend on Monday night at the Union Square Max Brenner, which I'm not embarrassed to love, I got on a 4 train to Grand Central.  As soon as the doors closed, a man with a booming voice announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?"  This usually means one of two things:

 

1) a couple of kids are going to turn on a boombox and whip around the train car, catapulting themselves off of the poles, flipping themselves over the handrails, and somersaulting around briefcases, or

 

2) yet another homeless person is going to tell his real or imagined sob story, expecting me to take off my headphones and pay attention to him as he shuffles up and down the car.

 

I give money to one of these and daydream about the nonexistence of the other.  But this was something entirely different.  

 

The man said, "Get ready for the show!" and began rhythmically pounding the seat beside him with his hands.  Two little girls on the seat across from him hopped up and gyrated down the empty aisles in matching green-striped t-shirts, hands on their hips and in their braided hair.  Their skills were straight out of a hip-hop video, and I was embarrassed for them when their dad had to tell them not to move so sexily on the metal poles in the center of the train.  They were all of seven and nine years old, and if I had been their mother, I would've squeezed their little heads to my bosom and never let them out of the house again until they were sagging and wrinkly.  

 

But their father let them parade up and down the train with his ballcap, pleading through gap teeth, "Money, please!" and "Can I have some money?"  They only got $2 out of us, so hopefully this will mark the end of their exotic dancing careers. 

 

– Katie Ett, unapologeticallymundane.com