The Berenstain Bears Gotta Dance!

BROTHER BEAR AFRAID TO DANCE?
"No, dancing is just dumb," he says. But when Brother hears that Bonnie Brown may go to the big spring dance with Too-Tall Grizzly, he wonders if a dance-floor klutz can become a disco dynamo in less than a week.

Something tells me that Bonnie isn't really looking for a disco dynamo. But this is Bear Country, maybe their universe is a couple of decades behind ours.

The Berenestain Bears Gotta Dance! is another Brother-centric book, and it's specifically a Brother-being-pathetic-centric book, kind of like New Girl in Town. Actually, Gotta Dance! is like a direct sequel to New Girl in Town. I don't think that's ever been done in Berenstain Bears before. The Big Chapter books will have some more continuity and story arcing and throwbacks than the other Berenstain Bear books.

Here's the story sting:

Before Brother knew it, Bonnie had him on the dance floor. A huge crowd of cubs made a circle around them. They were clapping and shouting, "Brother's gotta dance! Brother's gotta dance!"
Then the music started, and Bonnie was dancing like crazy. Brother tried to pick up the beat BUT HE COULDN'T MOVE HIS FEET! They were stuck to the floor! The music pounded in his ears. The crowd shouted, "Gotta dance! Gotta dance!"

Did you ever, as a child, have to endure such a fate? Being forced to dance? Stan and Jan make it sound as horrifying as it really is.

The summary on the copyright page says, "With the help of Sister's ballet teacher, Brother Bear conquers his fear of dancing and can ask his favorite girl cub to the school dance." In my experience, though, a fear of dancing isn't a fear of actual dancing, but a fear of looking like a total loser. But as we know from New Girl in Town, that's the kind of thing Bonnie goes for, so Brother should actually be eager to dance.

The book begins with Brother boring the hell out of Sister, talking about softball and basketball. Specifically, how good he is at both. Sister tries to get him to shut up by mentioning the party she will got to at Lizzy Bruin's house, and all of the dancing that will go on. Brother says, "Great, Sis. Wiggle and jump around to dopey music all night. What a stupid thing to do." Sounds harsh, but when you take into account the wholly stupid-looking dance move Sister is showing off in the illustration, you want to give Brother a break. Also, when you take into account that dance music these days really is pretty dopey (OOM-TS OOM-TS OOM-TS OOM-TS) you want to give Brother a further break.

Sister doesn't like his attitude, and fights back by mentioning the rumor that Bonnie wants to go with Too-Tall to the Spring Dance. Even though Brother made perfectly clear he did not need a girlfriend in the last book, his reaction to this rumor is not a happy one. The fact that he despises T00-Tall doesn't help him feel better. Brother realizes that he's been thinking about Bonnie a lot, and would like to be more than just friends with her.

Oh, God damn it, Brother. In the very previous book you were going on about how you needed a friend more than a girlfriend. You went on about how going steady with Bonnie didn't seem as nice when you didn't have the Bear/Grizzly feud getting in the way. Now that you get a slap in the face regarding the fact that you don't like to dance, suddenly you want to win her heart. What do you want, Brother? What do you want?

Actually, it says right there in the text, "He wanted to go to the movies with her, to the Burger Bear, and to dances... Dances that was the real problem." See, Brother can't dance, and he worries that he always looks silly when he tries, and the sillier he feels, the worse he gets, and even though not being able dance is a great excuse for turning down invitations to parties from girls he doesn't like, it doesn't do him much good when Bonnie is a terrific dancer.

Too-Tall is the exact opposite of Brother. Brother is a nice young boy who can't dance, and Too-Tall is a big jerk who's a dancing machine. As much as he knows Bonnie doesn't like Too-Tall, Brother can imagine she would want to dance with him.

When Brother and Sister get home, Sister offers to give him some dancing tips, 'cause she knows he'd want to learn and impress Bonnie. Brother turns her down, the idea of learning to dance from his Sister is too humiliating. He says he doesn't even care that Bonnie would like to dance with Too-Tall. She doesn't buy it.

"If you say so," said Sister. "But I can just see old Too-Tall doing the Swivel with Bonnie. And let me tell you," she said, pretending to see something awful. "it's not a pretty sight."

Papa is just sitting there listening to his daughter say things like that. He doesn't pay much attention, because he decides he's going to teach Brother some dancing. He looks up ballroom dancing in the encyclopedia and sets forth to teach Brother the Box Step. Sister derides him for choosing a "prehistoric" dance, but Papa insists it's the best start. Papa then commences the dance lesson.

The size difference between Papa and Brother causes some difficulty, and leads to one of my favorite passages in a Berenstain Bear book ever:

Mama came in from the kitchen. She looked at Papa and Brother with raised eyebrows.
"ONE-two-three-four, ONE-two-three-four," shouted Papa. "I'm teaching him the Box Step." He was pushing Brother around the living room the way a bulldozer might push a load of gravel around an unfinished parking lot.

If that's how Papa dances Brother is probably in mortal danger.

The next day is Saturday and Sister has ballet class. She takes lessons from Madame Bearishnikov at the Bear Country Mall. Mama can't take Sister because she's too busy making pancakes (really) so she asks Brother to take her. Sister can't go by herself because it's too dangerous with Too-Tall and his gang around.

I know Too-Tall and his gang got busted recently for selling drugs, but clearly all of that has been forgiven by now, and otherwise, I haven't seen Too-Tall or any of the gang members cause anyone any actual harm. The worst Too-Tall ever did to Sister was steal her jump-rope, and what kind of big fucking deal is that, anyway? Besides, Brother is definitely Too-Tall's favorite target, not Sister. It probably puts her in more danger to have Brother accompany her than go by herself.

Brother even asks Sister if Too-Tall is really bothering her, and she replies that he and the gang hop around outside the ballet center and say, "Look, Ma! I'm da-a-a-ancin'!"

Mama's right, that's dangerous.

Brother clearly doesn't want to go, but Sister slips out that Bonnie also takes lessons from Madame Bearishnikov, and now Brother can't wait to get his ass out the door. As they walk, Brother thinks about the dream he had the night before. Bonnie invited him onto a dance floor with other cubs watching, but his feet literally stuck to the floor. He tried to lift them and sections of the floor came up with them. Bonnie looked at him like he was a creep, and then left to dance with Too-Tall.

It was such a frightening nightmare, but Brother worries that even if he does get some help, he's too far behind anyone else for it to do any good. He relegates himself to forever being a dancing doofus. He sheepishly asks Sister if many cubs are going to the Spring Dance, and she says everyone who's anyone will go, except for her stubborn Brother.

By the way, Sister tells him that she's going to the dance with cousin Freddy. Brother thinks that's weird, but Sister points out they aren't going to get married, just dance together. It may not be so weird if you put it that way, but I wonder if Freddy doesn't think it's the least bit pathetic of him to go to a dance with his younger cousin. If I went to a dance with a younger cousin, I would definitely feel like a loser. Maybe Freddy thinks it's better to be a loser who goes to a dance with his cousin than be a loser who does not go to the dance at all like his other cousin. Which means that Brother is a loser among losers.

They get to the fitness center and there be Too-Tall and his gang ostensibly teasing the other cubs but really just making fools of themselves. They prance and twirl and say, "Look, Ma! We're da-a-a-ancin'!" The ballet students actually giggle at them. When Bonnie shows up, though, Too-Tall tells the gang to cut it out and he tries to make nice with her.

"Too-Tall, you're impossible," she says. He replies, "I try to be, little lady. I try to be." What kind of a bully talks like that?

When Brother and Sister walk by, Too-Tall takes the opportunity tease Brother for wanting to learn ballet. Skuzz blocks the door, and Brother threatens to rearrange his face. No really, Brother actually says that: "I'll rearrange your face."

After more teasing from Too-Tall, Skuzz steps aside and let's Brother and Sister in. Brother probably thought that being teased by the most infamous bully cub in Bear Country is about as embarrassing as walking into a ballet class would get, but that's 100% wrong. He's about to get a lot more embarrassed.

As Sister prepares for the class, she tries to cheer Brother up. She tells him to just ignore the teasing, but he can't ignore what's about to happen next.

Madame Bearishnikov arrives and sees Brother, and she's please. The recital that the class is preparing to put on needs a few catches, lifts, and carries to really be complete. They need a male to perform these things, but the class has no boys in it. Now here's Brother, and Madame B is so excited she gets the whole class to break out into applause for him.

But Brother's not there to dance, he's just there because Mama made him protect Sister from the most non-threatening bully in existence. He tries to stammer his way through this explanation, and the once pleased Madame Bearishnikov transforms into Madame Bitchishnikov. She circles around Brother, pokes at him, and declares him a puny chicken.

"Yes. This is a puny chicken, with rubbery arms, wobbly legs, and muscles of Jell-O. Such a creature could never do the cathces, lifts, and carries that a male dancer must do. Why, a strong wind would blow him away. Poof!"

This pisses Brother off, and he demands a chance to prove himself. Madame B agrees. Brother looks around for Bonnie for the reassurance that she's about to see how awesome he is, but she's not there. This will prove to be a good thing, trust me.

Madame B tells Sister to leap into Brother's arms so he can prove that he can do a simple catch. Sister, who just a minute earlier told Brother not to let himself be embarrassed by Too-Tall's teasing, gladly accepts to the opportunity to utterly humiliate him in front of a number of girls. Or maybe she thinks he can actually do it. After all, in the previous book, he caught Bonnie as she fell from Cousin Freddy's craptastic crumbling balcony. Surely, if Sister leaps into his arms from floor level, he can catch her.

She runs, she leaps, and he falls over onto his butt. I'm sorry, tin can.

The girls laugh at him, and Madame B smirks so hard she should be in Too-Tall's gang. "Well, Brother," she says, "I think you have given us all a good idea of what you can and can't do." Brother sulks into another room to wait for the class to end. He peeks through the window in the door and notices Bonnie come in. He takes small solace in the fact that she didn't see any of the episode.

Brother turns and notices that he walked into a weight room, and decides, what the heck, why not work out while he waits? When the class is over, despite having the self-esteem kicked out of him earlier, he feels good. In fact, he takes Sister to each subsequent ballet practice, so he can have the weight room all to himself. Still, going to the Madame B's center means having to see Too-Tall try to buddy up with Bonnie, and that reminds him of his whole can't-dance-for-shit problem.

That's when this little passage pops up, "He knew he should do something about it. But what could he do except feel sorry for himself?" Are you kidding me? Brother can't be that pathetic. He can't be such a loser that feeling sorry for himself is the only option he considers. Just learn to dance, you little punk. There's a ballet teacher right there. You don't have to learn to prance around on your toes but she's got to be able to give you some pointers on at least keeping the damn beat.

The next scene really grinds my gears, too. Madame B walks into the weight room while Brother is exercising, to try to ask him again to at least learn enough ballet to play a part in the upcoming performance. Brother turns her down, and says it's not because he's embarrassed to be a boy dancing ballet, but that he has too much on his mind to handle learning ballet. Somehow, Madame B figures that it's a problem "of the heart" and lets it go. What? Earlier, when Brother was just plain not interested, she happily berated him for being a puny wimp and convinced Sister to help humiliate him in front of all the ballet students. Now that he's got a problem of the heart, she accepts that and lets it go? And I can't stand Brother for continuing to be polite to Madame B when he should call her out on that bullshit.

So, there's a week until the dance, and Brother, despite probably being a certifiable hunk by this point, goes to the pile of rocks that he dubs his thinking place and mopes around. He knows he has to learn to dance if he wants Bonnie to go the Spring Dance with him and not Too-Tall, but he only has a week. He's about to give up when Bonnie appears.

"I thought I would would find you in your Sulking—I mean, Thinking—Place," she says. You know, twice now, Brother has fled to this thinking place, and twice now he hasn't come up with any solution to his problems, and twice now Bonnie has arrived to set things right. This Thinking Place is actually a Make Bonnie Show Up and Save the Day Place.

And save it she does. She reveals that she started the rumor about her going to the dance with Too-Tall. She overestimated Brother's resolve, and thought that the rumor would inspire him to learn to dance so that she could as him to the Spring Dance, not Too-Tall. But instead of being inspired to dance, Brother just got all sad and sulky. But, Brother asks, if she's not going to the dance with Too-Tall or Brother, then who with?

"You just don't get it, do you? I'm not going to the dance at all." Brother's really at the top of his pathetic game on this one. He actually tells Bonnie to go to the dance with Too-Tall because they are both so good that they will surely win the dancing prize; he can't get it through his head that she just plain doesn't like Too-Tall. Now he feels guilty that she won't go to the dance.

Bonnie tells Brother that she'd rather hang out with him than go to the dance. They can go to a movie, or to the mall, or whatever, she says. He doesn't know how to respond to that, and Bonnie just tells him to walk her home, which he does, but remarkably he does not feel any better about the situation. He feels guilty about Bonnie's skipping the dance. Brother, she just said she wanted to spend the evening with you. Just show her a good time, for crying out loud. Take her to that movie, buy her dinner, tell her how much you like her, have a long walk on the beach hand-in-hand, have the night of your life. And then after, learn to dance, so that when the next Spring Dance comes along, you can have shown her that wonderful night, and then dance with her the next opportunity.

But this is Berenstain Bear land, and it's not going to work that way. Something much more sitcom is in store for us. And I mean that. The rest of this book is a sitcom plot.

By this point, even Sister has had enough of Brother's shenanigans. She decides he's a lost cause and focuses on her own ballet and Cousin Freddy-related dancing. But then, she casually mentions that Madame Bearishnikov is the judge at the Spring Dance. Brother asks how a ballet expert could judge pop dancing. Sister says Madame B is a connoisseur of all dancing types. That's when she gets a brilliant idea. She tells Madame B all about this brilliant idea.

The next day, during ballet practice, Madame B goes into the weight room to give Brother a proposition. If he learns a few ballet moves, only the ones necessary for the recital, she'll teach him some good pop moves in time for the Spring Dance. They'll even do it in private. Brother agrees. They're going to have a crash course in dancing. Clearly, this is what Sister's plan was, and clearly, Brother should have just asked Madame B for help from the very beginning.

He excitedly tells Sister and Bonnie, who know everything already, the good news, and they get to practicing. Brother is so nervous about his one-on-one in the weight room with Madame B, he asks her to put a poster up over the window in the door. No one shall see him learn to dance. The practices go well, though, and Brother is confident he can hold his own on a dance floor.

One day, Brother, Sister, and Bonnie find Too-Tall and his gang outside the door after practice. Even though this is not a regular practice day, Too-Tall somehow got wind that they were there. Too-Tall, as it turns out, really did think Bonnie was going to invite him to the Spring Dance, and with so little time left and still not being invited, he's come by to be a jerk. "Come on, baby," he says as they walk by, "I'll show you how to do the Snake."

But clearly, Brother, with his new muscles, was eagerly waiting for the chance to show off. He grabs Too-Tall, wrestles with him, twists him up, hauls him over his head, and tosses him into a Dumpster, a Dumpster placed right next to the fitness center. Then he walks away with Sister on one arm and Bonnie on the other. Too-Tall watches helplessly, angrily, and shocked.

The ballet recital is held on the same night as the Spring Dance, coming on first. It's a hit. Sister's a hit, Brother's a hit, everyone applauds, and Brother, for once, doesn't make a fool out of himself trying to dance. Immediately after it's over, the floor is cleared so that the Spring Dance can commence. While that happens, Too-Tall, who knows that Brother never locks his locker in the gym locker room, sneaks in with a box. He finds Brother's locker, opens it up, and sprinkles the contents of the box into something in Brother's locker. The book never explicitly mentions what's going on at first, but it's clear that Too-Tall just put itching powder into Brother's underwear.

Brother walks in and changes clothes. Clearly, this is slow-working itching powder, because Brother is able to get dressed, walk back to the gym, and dance with Bonnie for a while before the itching starts.

Queenie can't help but rib Too-Tall a little about his Dumpster escapade. "Where did you disappear to, before?" she asks. "I thought maybe you dumped me the way a certain someone dumped you in the mall Dumpster." Too-Tall doesn't mind the joke. He's busy watching Brother with anticipation. Soon enough, Brother gets an uncomfortable feeling, and he starts doing a peculiar new dance. That's when Too-Tall tells Queenie what he was up to: "I put itching powder in Brother's shorts!" Yeah, it says shorts even though Brother is wearing long pants in the illustration, so it's probably a euphemism for boxer shorts.

Brother is wiggling and twisting and doing all sorts of ridiculous things, but the other cubs get into it; they think he's in the process of inventing a wild new dance. He finally drops to the floor in exhaustion, and Madame B decides to award him Most Original Step. Bonnie gets Best Dancer. When Madame B asks Brother, still on the floor, what his new dance is called, he's too out of breath to answer, so he pulls Bonnie down and whispers it into her ear. Then he jumps up onto his feet and races into the locker room.

The narration switches gears a little, and starts narrating like all of this happened decades ago.

That dance of Brother's was quite a performance. To this day, they still talk about it in Bear Country. And even though Brother became a very good dancer, he never again danced the way he did that afternoon. Only a small number of his friends—and enemies—know what came over Brother that day.

Brother ran into the locker room to take a shower. He named the dance The Itch, and the name was even stenciled onto a trophy and put into a case outside of the principal's office. And that's how the book ends.

Gotta Dance! is not my favorite. Brother's behavior is so frustrating. He's such a pathetic little son of gun, and his actions are inconsistent here from the way they were in the previous book. He made such a big deal out of only being friends with Bonnie before, but in this book, clearly that doesn't mean squat. He doesn't even really try to solve any of his problems. He just gets mopey and sad and has to wait for someone else, either Bonnie or Sister to bail him out of it.

I don't think there are many good lessons for kids to take away from Gotta Dance! Brother gets over his sour grapes and fears about dancing, yes, but his method is so moronic, and he takes no initiative. I also don't like that scene where Madame B chooses to embarrass him simply because he's not interested in ballet. It's too cruel. Also, Bonnie was nice, and told him that he didn't have to dance, and they could still hang out. That would have been a fine way to resolve the issue, but then this sitcom plot about trading pop dance lessons for ballet lessons and Too-Tall and itching powder really just ruins it. It's not that good a book, neither for kids or for nostalgic adults.

Sorry for the "Bitchishnikov." I couldn't resist.