The Dancer

Sammy Brown can boogie down.
Her dancing is superb.
She knows a bit of every style
to make body sway and swerve.

She'll squeeze her knees,
bounce up and down,
bow low to brush the ground.
Then lightly up on tippee toes,
in a lovely ballet pose.

She's leaping round from foot to foot,
so graceful 'cross the floor.
Then sadly, Sammy's performance ends -
they've opened the bathroom door.

You're lucky to have had this chance
to see a master of the pee-pee dance.

-B.C. Byron

There are many forms in the classical art of pee-pee dance:

• The knee squeeze
• Ants in the pants
• The squat-and-wiggle
• Tippee toe
• The lurching turtle
• Grab and bend
• Redfaced freeze frame
• Screaming hip wiggle
• The bounce n’ scoot

While it can be entertaining to watch a frantic camper wiggling outside the outhouse, one has to wonder if the peepee dance is actually effective. Does bouncing around like a nut and grunting like a boar actually help a person hold in their urine longer? If there are any biology or doctoral students reading this, please consider the potty dance study for your doctoral thesis. I’d really like to know if my dancing efforts are worth more than just a laugh. It should be a simple study. Have 200 people drink 10 sodas each and wait for 2 hours. Then inform the crowd that there are only two bathrooms available. One bathroom will have a waiting line with a narrow railing on each side where the scientists can herd the people in tightly, ensuring that there is absolutely no room for performing the potty dance or any kind of wiggling. Keep packing them in tighter until there are 100 people in the line. The remaining 100 people will be led to an open field with a single port-a-potty in the middle – plenty of room to get your boogie on. Now a team of interns with stopwatches and notebooks comes in to time how long it takes for people to have an accident. My hypothesis is that the peepee dance is only a mental distraction from the discomfort of the bathroom urge. The two groups will wet their pants around the same time on average, but group B (in the potty dance area) will feel like they held out longer when they’re surveyed about their experience. But you may prove me wrong, and get a doctorate degree out of it too.

I don’t recommend conducting this type of study in a public park or other place where lingering tinkle smell will cause a problem. And be sure to bring plenty of disinfectant and free trousers for all the participants. But this is important work and I’m sure you’ll be able to easily find the funding. If the potty dance is indeed found to be effective at staving off wet pants, a follow-on study could be conducted to determine which dance moves have the most benefit. I could see this turning into a marketable product where parents of gradeschool children pay for a series of learning videos that teach their kids the optimum moves for restroom emergencies. Not only could families stay longer in the movie theater without interruptions, but it would be a great way to get exercise. Sort of a potty Zumba workout.