The two-left-feet league and return of the Mc-appetite

I say this because everyone is absolutely nuts about dancing. TV shows such as Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance? get top ratings.

The dance-happy film High School Musical 3: Senior Year was a box-office smash. Dance studios report business is booming, even with the economy tanking.

This only makes the dancing-impaired feel worse about themselves.

Look, we know we have no rhythm and no timing. We know we are incapable of making any fluid movements or moving any part of our body to the beat.

But don't throw it in our faces with hit shows and films and say: “Look, everyone else can dance! What's wrong with you?''

Even in these enlightened times, society can be cruel to the dancing-impaired.

People see us lurching around the dance floor and call us clods and big goofs. They laugh at us. They say we have two left feet.

You don't think this hurts? I wish you could see our little faces turn bright red at times like these.

Statistically — and this is not exactly stop-the-presses stuff — the vast majority of the dancing-impaired are men.

One of us

Oh, and Cloris Leachman. Did you see her doing the cha-cha on Dancing With the Stars recently? It was like watching a woman in a cocktail dress trying to stomp fire ants. Yes, she is in her eighties, God love her.

But she couldn't dance when she was 22. You can tell. The dancing-impaired don't need a secret handshake to recognise one of our brethren.

Now she is gone from the show, banished for having no grace on the dance floor, no liveliness in her steps, no business being out there. Certainly not in front of a national audience. But she is one of us.

That is why we in the dancing-impaired community give the old gal our unconditional love and support.

And we hope she gets another sitcom, too. By the way, asking the dancing-impaired to watch Dancing With the Stars is like asking someone who washed out of medical school to watch ER.

It pains us to see even big, burly football players such as Warren Sapp and Olympic sprinters such as Maurice Greene gliding and twirling so confidently, when we can only jerk spasmodically from side to side.

Sadly, modern science and technology offer little hope for the dancing-impaired.

There are no medications on the horizon that will cure our klutziness, no clinical trials being conducted with micro-implants to make our bodies move lithely with the music. Well-meaning people will often ask us: “If it upsets you so much, why don't you take dance lessons?''

Oh, some of us have gone that route. But it never really works. You can no more teach the dancing-impaired to be light on their feet than you can teach an orangutan to perform Othello. Still, other kind souls will often watch us lunging and twitching on the dance floor and say: “Oh, you're not that bad a dancer. I've seen much worse.''

But when you ask them to name even one person who dances worse, there is only an uncomfortable silence as they stare down at their shoes. Then they will change the subject to the economy, the big game or something like that.

Eating with the in crowd

People don't usually think of me as hip but I can fool you sometimes, which is why I was standing in line at a McDonald's the other day with the big lunch crowd.

Maybe you heard: McDonald's is the hot place to eat again. Its sales rose 8.2 per cent in October, which analysts attribute to consumers watching their pennies and gravitating to cheap fast food.

Of course, even as I placed my order with the requisite bored-looking kid behind the counter, I flashed back to what happened to poor Morgan Spurlock.

Remember Spurlock? He was the guy who made the 2004 film Super Size Me, about the effects of eating too much fast food.

I have no plans to pull another Spurlock just because I am trying to stretch a buck here. He was sacrificing his body for a cause, knocking back Egg McMuffins and hash browns for breakfast, Double Quarter Pounders with cheese and super-sized fries for lunch, and ten-piece Chicken McNuggets for dinner.

But not me, brother. I need to keep this lithe, ripped body in tip-top condition. So I ordered the Southwest salad with grilled chicken and Newman's Own low-fat balsamic vinaigrette dressing — and a bottle of water. For dessert, I decided to go wild and have one of those Fruit ‘n' Yoghurt Parfait things that comes with granola.

When I asked the kid behind the counter if he knew what exactly was in the Southwest salad, he gave me a blank look. Then he turned and walked away!

At this point I thought: Wow, here's an employee who's sick of the prissy yoghurt-and-granola crowd. But a few seconds later, he returned with a Southwest salad so I could see for myself what was in it: lettuce, roasted tomatoes, corn and beans.

So that is what I had for lunch. And, actually, it was pretty tasty. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of other wussy salad-eaters in the crowd, though. Other diners seemed to be pounding the usual Big Macs and Quarter Pounder variations and fries, and washing it all down with wastebasket-size Cokes and Sprites.

But that was OK with me. To each his own. I was just happy to be eating with the in-crowd, even in tough times.