It takes a village, people

Today I need to talk to you about a very important issue.  It's something that I have been concerned about for a number of years, actually, but have never said anything about in a public forum before because I just wasn't sure that people were ready to talk about it, that we might not have the maturity as a society to take a step back, look at ourselves and say "This cannot be allowed to continue.  Something MUST be done."  It's the tremendously important issue of "people who can't do the YMCA dance".

I know, I know what you're thinking, "I'd really like a piece of lolly-cake right now", and that's fair enough, I really want lolly-cake too.  In addition to wanting lolly-cake you may also be questioning whether the issue of "people who can't do the YMCA dance" is a serious one.  Because, surely, in this day and age with modern technology such as YouTube and um...YouTube, everybody knows how to do this...don't they?

Well you could be forgiven for thinking that, but in fact I've done extensive research on this topic (aka bus trips) and my empirically gathered data tells me that as much as 70 per cent of revellers fail in basic YMCA dance execution.  Even more shocking, there seems to be no correlation between level of drunkenness and YMCA-fail.  Granted, most of the people attempting YMCA arm semaphore are drunk (because honestly, why would you otherwise?) but those sober disco-demons who succumb to dancefloor peer pressure have no greater success with the simple four-letter routine than those who are so drunk they can't understand why that cute girl in the corner never gets up to dance.  Yeah, it's because she's a pokey machine.  (That's not a euphemism, by the way - ole Drunky McDrunkard has actually been making eyes at Aztec's Treasure.)

So where are we going wrong and what can be done?  Well, the problem is an easy one to identify and it has to do with symmetry.  It's entirely possible that YOU have even been incompetently performing the YMCA dance for many years without knowing it, so please, please pay close attention to this next bit. It's not the Y that's causing the grief. It's not the M.  And it definitely isn't the A.  It's the C.  That pesky, unsymmetrical, curving-to-one-side C.

The problem is that when people go to make the C they imagine the letter as they might see it on a page in front of them.  They then form the letter C with their arms leaning to the right.  This means that the letter they have formed only looks like a C from behind them.  Anyone viewing this formation from the front will see a banana, a croissant or a crescent moon but not a C.  The correct way to form the YMCA C is to make that crescent shape with your arms extended to the left. 

This revelation can be very confronting to those who have never questioned their own C-forming skills before so you may need to take a few minutes to let it sink in.  Feel free to do some practice attempts to make the letter C with your arms in the different positions if you need to work through it.  Don't worry about your workmates seeing, they already think you're a freak anyway, just become one with your inner C-ness.

Mind what you have learned.  Save you, it can.*  And now that you know the truth, you must pass this knowledge on to others.  This isn't about dancing.  This isn't even about disco.  This is an education issue and it will take all of us, together, to rid ourselves of the scourge of backwards Cs on our dancefloors.  Apparently it takes The Village People to raise a child, and it will take a nation of fine, upstanding, arm-waving people to turn that C back the way it was always supposed to go.

Will you join me in this struggle for correct letter formation?  There's a time for waving your hands in the air, waving them like you just don't care, but maybe, sometimes, a little bit of care is actually called for?  Of course if anyone would like to discuss similar issues that they have with The Time Warp, The Macarena or Agadoo you're most welcome to espouse on them in the comments below.

*completely irrelevant Star Wars reference