The Elaine Benes Phenomenon

It is Saturday night and my friends and I have all gathered at the local watering hole. With adult sodas in hand, we’re ready to paint the townie bar red and toss our ambitions and measly paychecks out the window. Ah, to be young, awesome and in the midst of a financial crisis.

The breathy vocals of the new Britney Spears song start pumping through the sound system and only after one shout of “This is my song!” do we make our way to the dance floor. We are all singing, well, screaming, and pretending that we didn’t already watch Britney’s new video one million times and have already memorized the choreography. My friend Jen sat this one out, as she wanted to finish her 30 ounce margarita that was impossible to actually lift off of the bar.

Jen is a good friend of mine. She has personality, a great sense of humor and is considered to be quite the Babe-raham Lincoln. Being single most of her life, those close to her have always wondered why she rarely landed dates and almost never had boyfriends. Before this starts sounding like an advertisement for E-Harmony or the trailer for the “Sex and the City” movie, let me explain the point of this story. Jen was a victim of a popular new epidemic sweeping the nation I like to refer to as the “Elaine Benes Phenomenon.”

If you have never watched the television show “Seinfeld,” then you do not know who Elaine Benes is. Allow me to paint you a picture. To put it bluntly, Elaine Benes is the worst dancer in the world. Her friends are constantly embarrassed by her moves yet Elaine cannot seem to stop dancing, or take a hint from people cringing at the site of her on a dance floor.

You actually may know some Elaine Benes’ yourself! Have you ever gone to 80’s night at a bar with your friends and thought it would be hilarious to hit the dance floor doing the “Running Man” or “The Carlton” in exchange for some good laughs? This is how my friend Jen dances, on a normal night, with far less hand-eye coordination and far more disturbing cries from onlookers. With flailing arms and gyrations that could only be compared to muscle spasms, Jen looks like Michael Flatley: Lord of Dance, after being tazered. Herein lies The Elaine Benes Phenomenon, or in laymen’s terms, hot girls who are horrific dancers.

After realizing that ordering another margarita may be a bad idea, even though it somehow only cost $4.50 (gotta love townie bars!), Jen decides it is time to hit the floor. She approaches us and our facial expressions go from excited to sour in less then a second. We’ll have to tell her we all just took Tequila shots. Jen begins swiveling her hips to let us know she is feeling the song and is about to unleash the terror.

“Should we tell her she looks like Beyonce after overdosing on a bottle of Valium?” my friend Meghan asks me in sheer embarrassment.

“She looks like she is Electric Sliding right over broken glass and open flames,” my other friend Angi says horrified.

Everyone is watching Jen dance. Everyone is glued to watching her, which only fuels her ambition to keep dancing, now that she has an audience.

“I’m on fire tonight!” Jen exclaims.

Yes, Jen, you are on fire. Like a horrific car accident that has set a car ablaze that no one can turn away from staring at. Whatever she is doing, it needs to stop.

My friends and I do what any other group of terrified onlookers would do, we form a circle around her until the music ends, protecting the eyes of worried patrons. We then shuttle Jen over to the bar to get her so drunk that she’ll be incapable of leaving the bar stool she is now sitting on. Let’s just hope everyone else follows suit so they forget the Horror Movie they were just subjected to for the longest four minutes their life.

Whether the Elaine Benes Phenomenon is a new trend or something that has always been lurking in bars and clubs across America, one thing is for sure, it is repelling single men away from my friend. Unless we can find a guy who enjoys the subtle thumbs up and awkward kick-dancing that Elaine Benes trademarked during “Seinfeld” so well, we need to be serious and proactive about finding a cure.