Dancing like crazy at the bank
6:27AM
I had to accompany my Dad to one of his banks yesterday morning, to the Armed Forces and Police Savings and Loan Association, better known as AFPSLAI, in Camp Aguinaldo at the corner of EDSA and Boni Serrano.
AFPSLAI is a humongous building inside the camp, and is a very busy one at that. Lots of people go there to conduct bank business everyday, retirees, active soldiers, their family members and regular people. It has this massive air-conditioned room at the ground floor with many counters and TV screens showing numbers and wait times.
There are rows and rows of seats for the waiting bank customers there, and I was seated at one of them at the back, waiting for my Dad’s number to be called. I had brought my Kindle so I could while away the time reading; I figured there would be a long wait, and I was right.
I had been reading for a while but there was a tickling sensation at the back of my neck, as if there was a fly buzzing around there. I turned around and was startled to see a kid—well, not a kid really; he was on the cusp of puberty, around 12 or 13 years old—dancing behind me like crazy.
He was jumping around and doing acrobatics in place right behind me, completely lost in his actions, and he was doing it all in silence. There was no music, except for the one playing in his head, but he had no headset clamped to his ears and no iPod or other music player in sight.
The kid was breakdancing in a crowded bank. Quietly.
He was a skinny kid, wearing a white tank top with a small towel tucked in over his back the way moms usually put small towels in, in a misguided effort to keep the sweat from his back and keep him from getting a cold, or as my late Mom put it, keep him from getting “pulmonia”. (Yes, it was done to me too, way back when.)
This kid was breaking out all the moves, and then some. He moonwalked and his arms were like jelly, contorting into different configurations, and he was working up a sweat. Was there something wrong with him, acting this way? I pointedly stared at him, in the hopes that it would shame him into stopping, but he was oblivious.
Either he was mentally compromised, or had some unique kind of autism. But no—he would stop every so often to drink from his bottle of Tropicana, which his mom held for him while he danced. He would act normally then, and his mother didn’t seem to think anything was wrong.
In fact, most of the people around him were acting as if it was all a normal thing. That, or they were embarrassed for the kid and desperately pretended nothing was amiss, which was the more likely case.
The kid kept doing it the whole time I was there, which was a considerably long time, almost an hour and a half. He would stop and rest for a few minutes, sitting quietly beside him mom and drinking his Tropicana and fussing about with an old Samsung cellphone, and then he would suddenly stand up and begin dancing again.
When we left, he was still breakdancing like a loon.
How friggin’ bizarre.
Snacker Snarking