Tonight we went to our first new baby class.

I have an array of responses to this event. They range from the absurdist to the unsettling.

First, we somehow managed to enter in the middle of the course of study. Everyone else has been through four classes or so, and they know each other. They have binders that weren’t available to us, and they have, most devastatingly, rapport with the RN who ran the class with some other lady whose credentials remain unestablished.

In this situation, it is hard, but not impossible for me to avoid attempting to rush into a rapport-establishing mode. I am like an alcoholic when this happens, except with, um, rapport.

So I struggled with this, in deference to my wife, who hates that I am constantly striving to connect by chatting with strangers, identifying commonalities, chiming in with information. Try having a conversation near me on a bus and mentioning you’re from my hometown of Pittsburgh. I didn’t like living there that much, and I rarely go back, but if I hear you say the magic P-word, I can barely contain myself.

Tonight, though, it was different. I scarcely spoke out in the class seeking to lock down a healthy dose of rapport once. I didn’t make a particularly funny remark when fake poop was discovered in the diapers we were changing on the fake babies (though a perfect one appeared before my eyes, dancing like the directions to nirvana). I didn’t chat with the other parents to be, I didn’t ask the RN an unnecessary question just to have a conversation.

We learned about bathing the babies, and I made snarky comments to Katrena (which are still acceptable, apparently) and I demonstrated my adroitness with the burrito-roll method of baby swaddling as well as diaper application. The baby didn’t get water in its little plastic eyes once.

Of course, there was a short video at the beginning. We watched it in an early-eighties auditorium that reminded me of my junior high school auditorium, in that it had only hosted criminally lame receptions where employees of the month are lauded by a hospital administrator who wouldn’t know this employee if she bit him on the tit. The television was an early eighties rear-projection model that couldn’t show our video without bringing along the constant tinny wheedling noise of the NBA playoff game whose signal bled over from its tune-channel.

And the video starred Pam Dawber, Mindy, of “Mork and Mindy.” This was inevitable. I may as well have been in an episode of the Simpsons watching Troy McClure (from such films as “The Leper in the Backfield) run down information about our new baby.

Pam was wearing a flowing mint green dress with a matching belt. She could have had boots on, but I couldn’t tell when she walked from early-eighties fireplace to early-eighties couch where early-eighties couple was watching their beautiful baby coo.

When I saw all the babies, though, I was admittedly smiling like a buffoon at the prospect of having one of our own. Katrena began crying immediately. I tried to say that I hope our baby is that happy with its early-eighties family, but I couldn’t get the words out without laughing. Nobody bothered staring at me because they were still annoyed from a few minutes earlier, when I removed a legal pad from my bag to take notes during this riotous movie. Even Katrena stared at me when I whipped out the yellow signature of note-taking. So nobody bothered craning their necks when I made a snorting noise after a particularly amusing montage of early-eighties fathers, all with moustaches and indoor-tint glasses, googling at their babies or taking sage direction from their eighties pediatricians.

Five more Tuesdays.