At The Darwin Day Dance

“Do you know what day it is today? Can anyone tell me?”, asked the science teacher, Mrs Winner, surveying her classroom of about 30 first year pupils.

Hands shot up all round her but Mrs Winner only looked towards a few of the children in her class who were her favourites, ignoring the rest.

“Yes, Catherine”, she asked, pointing to a pretty looking girl in a bright flowery skirt and top who then rose to her feet.

“Darwin Day, miss”, said Catherine, rather proudly.

“That’s right and does anyone know who Darwin was?”, asked Mrs Winner.

Hands shot up again and, again, Mrs Winner went to that chosen few that she liked better than all the rest, “Yes, Tommy Nelson”, she asked, pointing towards a handsome,
athletic looking boy.

“Darwin was a scientist miss, in the olden days”, said Tommy, “He came up with the theory of
Evolution”.

“Good Tommy”, said the teacher, now turning towards the blackboard and writing out the word
E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N in fluorescent, yellow chalk.

Then Mrs Winner went on to tell them all about Evolution and Natural Selection but, in truth, most of them knew all too well about Natural Selection as do most who are journeying through the brutal, primitive landscape of childhood and adolescence.

Daniel Meek, for example, who always sat in a shadowy corner at the rear of the class was what most people would call a born loser. He wasn’t smart like the swots in the class who teachers
seemed to adore; he wasn’t strong or fast like the star-athletes who were always the apple of a P.E. instructors eye, he wasn’t handsome or fun to be around like the boys who always had the prettiest girls crowding round them and he wasn’t even intimidating or cool or hard like the boys who were the school bullies and trouble makers and yet who seemed to be successful in their own unconventional way, having girlfriends and crazy parties and a happy, if wasted, youth.

Daniel Meek would have no happy youth and, according to his teachers, no bright future either. He often thought of himself as one of those slow members of a herd of antelope who were destined only to be picked off by lions or jackals.

That was what he had decided to dress as anyhow, at the Darwin Day Dance, a dying antelope, slightly gnawed away by the sharp, ripping jaws of strong, quick, stealthy lions; a dying antelope
skulking in a corner of the assembly hall on his own while other fitter boys confidently crossed the floor and asked girls to dance.

But then, you could say if you believed in such things, a miracle occurred.

Mrs Winner was going round the class asking every child what costume they were wearing to the Dance, “Remember, you have to come as some creature that best represents who you are”, she’d added, and most of the children had chosen the typical costumes that you might expect
kids to choose, there were about 5 lions among them, three tigers, two bears, one hippo, one giraffe, an octopus and a shark but then she came to a girl called Agnes Lamb who, rather boldly, informed the teacher that she wasn’t going to the dance because her family didn’t believe in Evolution, they were Creationists.

Practically every boy and girl in the classroom burst out laughing when they heard this and even the teacher had a mocking, condescending tone as she fired a rapid volley of questions designed to
burst the bubble of the girls irrational beliefs which Agnes had no hope of answering and which
only resulted in her bursting into tears as the home time bell started to ring.

But then Daniel saw his chance, going over to console the sobbing girl, “If there was another Christian like you to go to the dance with, do you think you would go to the dance with them?”, he asked shyly.

“Are you a Christian?”, she asked, surprised, her face suddenly brightening through her tears.

“No but I really want to be, if you’d teach me and maybe we could go to the dance together as Christians”, he said, trying to look earnest.

“Okay”, she said, her eyes suddenly glowing with inspiration as Daniels heart leapt like a salmon up a towering waterfall, “But we won’t just go as Christians. I know what we can go as”.

And, that evening, without telling his parents who were both strict atheists, Daniel ditched his dying antelope costume in a skip and instead went over to Agnes’s house where her mother had been busy putting together a pair of creationist costumes.

Admittedly, it was embarrassing, not to mention chilly, when he and Agnes finally turned up for the Darwin Day Dance, she in a flesh coloured bikini and he in a skimpy pair of flesh coloured swimming trunks with only large strategically placed paper fig-leaves to protect their modesty and, as he’d expected, everyone at the dance just laughed at them in their Adam and Eve outfits but he didn’t care because at least he didn’t feel like a loser anymore; he had a girlfriend now and, while all the other smarter, stronger or handsomer kids were staring at them and smaning he was just looking into Agnes’s beautiful green eyes and thanking Jesus for giving a dying antelope a lucky break.