Doing the Hokey Pokey with a Dear Friend

So, now that I have your full attention - this blog will NOT be about what you are thinking of, at all!  Besides, I don't think that IT is called that anymore anyways, right?  No, this blog is about actually singing the Hokey Pokey, that meaningless song that is so well known and loved by so many kids, with my beautiful and wonderful friend, Manisha.
Let's start with why we were singing the Hokey Pokey in the first place, shall we?  You see, for our primary pedagogy class, Manisha and I had to come up with a lesson plan based on a song of our choice for Cycle One students.  We had figured that the Hokey Pokey is a fun and action-filled song that would be more than suitable for our targetted learners and we had begun to plan for our assignment with a suitable amount of time left before it was due, but of course, we had managed to leave a lot of things until the last minute, as most students, even good ones like us, tend to do.
So, on the night before our project was due, Manisha and I had barricaded ourselves in the TESL library after having inhaled some fabulous sweet potato burritos with organic sprout salad for yours truly and a quinoa salad for her;  the burritoes had been just the right amount of spice with the innovative addition of my favorite veggie, sweet potatoes, and the usual burrito ingredients: beans, tomatoes, lettuce and cheese.  The vinaigrette on the sprout salad was a tangy pesto taste that complemented the burrito marvellously and I can imagine the slightly nutty flavour of the quinoa salad being rather tasty as well.
Manisha and I had not initially wanted to spend the whole night working, but we were both rather distracted by other occurrences in our lives and neither one of us could concentrate;  hence the reason why we were still at the TESL library at ten o'clock on a Thursday night.  We usually work fabulously together because we complement each other so well, but that night, we were not doing much work other than laughing, talking or listening to various dance songs.  Generally though, we complement each other in the same manner that the sweet potato is an unexpected yet completely perfect sidekick to the burrito combination - I am the off-the-wall creature who comes up with all sorts of bizarre ideas while Manisha is the grounded intellectual who pulls me back down to earth from way up in the clouds as though she is reeling in a balloon as it has begun to float away.  That is partly why I love her so!
We were having an unusually harder time getting to work and staying focused, but we were having so much fun regardless, giggling, chatting about everything and nothing and playing Shakira songs to try to motivate us to keep going!  We did, however, need to complete this project before we both went a little more stir crazy than we already were from having been enclosed within the same four walls the whole day, and so we wanted to get our recording of the song done as soon as possible.  We had propped her laptop on the tiny desk and we were ready to go;  we had gone through the whole song once without any mishaps and we thought we had the whole song down.
As we began to record ourselves, I silently vowed that I would not laugh, which is an incredible feat for me to try to accomplish as any of you know who has the pleasure of counting me as an acquaintance or friend, but I pledged to stifle my giggle reflex nevertheless.  Well, I surprisingly did pretty well until we got to the tongue bit.  You know, when you stick your tongue out and in while having to continue singing with your tongue hanging out of your mouth?  Yeah, THAT part!  I saw Manisha from the corner of my eye, because of course in order NOT to laugh, I could not directly look at her, and I completely lost the little composure that I had been holding onto.  Just seeing her trying to remain serious while mumbling the Hokey Pokey lyrics with her tongue sticking out of her mouth seemed so hilarious to me;  her long black hair pulled back into an "I'm doing school work" ponytail, her dark chocolate eyes glued to the screen in front of her so as not to catch my own smirking amethyst eyes and her posture as straight as a wooden ruler.  She continued to look straight in front of her, her lips turning up ever so slightly as she tried to control herself for both of our sakes while I finally let out the laughter that had been practically choking me from the moment we had pressed the recording button.
Now, tell me in all earnestness, how many of you can say that you have sung a favorite childhood song with one of your very dear friends while you are in complete control of all your faculties, meaning, while being utterly sober?  I can say that I have and that it was one of the best and silliest moments that I have enjoyed in a long while.  Thinking of those few minutes made me smile and chuckle to myself today when I was not feeling so cheerful and I am looking forward to sharing so many more special and ridiculous moments with this friend of mine that has become so important in my life.