First night out: kinds of kids.(The Talk of the Town)

If you attend private school in Manhattan, by the time you're in the sixth grade you have probably heard of the Goddard Gaieties. These are dances -- one or two each year -- that are held for middle-school students in the basement of either the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, at Eighty-fourth and Park, or the Unitarian Church of All Souls, at Eightieth and Lexington.A ticket costs forty-five dollars and supports the good works of the Goddard Riverside Community Center.

A few Fridays ago, at a sixth-grade Gaiety at All Souls, the boys -- from Allen-Stevenson, Browning, Buckley, Collegiate, St. Bernard's, and St. David's -- were working hard to look as if they didn't care whether they were there. The girls -- from Brearley, Chapin, Hewitt, Marymount, Nightingale-Bamford, Sacred Heart, and Spence -- were excited to be out of uniform.

As girls and boys checked in at separate tables, an eleven-year-old from Collegiate, who wore a down vest despite the clammy heat of the All Souls basement, offered himself as a guide to the proceedings.

"Everywhere you look here, there are really girlie girls and the not-as-girlie girls," he said. "The girlie girls wear dark-pink tank tops that stop above their belly button. They have some sort of accessory, like a little bag. They have shoes with very high heels and very low-hanging jeans that they have to pull up every two minutes. Most are on the short side or nearly six feet tall. They rule the dance.

"The not-so-girlie girls are around average height. They also wear jeans, but not as low. They don't have any accessories -- at least, not a handbag. Instead of dancing around in little posses or hovering around one boy, they just cruise around the dance floor, maybe with one or two friends."

By then, some of the not-so-girlie girls had climbed onto a stage at the center of the room, where they stood scream-singing to the music. The Collegiate anthropologist continued, "Sacred Heart: showoffy; Chapin: uppity; Spence: self-absorbed; Hewitt: what's the word for always thinking about how you look? Oh, yeah, 'vain.' "

A classmate with black hair and ...