homecoming

For those wondering: I did indeed survive my first ever excursion into chaperoning. But not without consequence - I ended up feeling ill Monday morning and called in sick today to stay home and rest with the hopes of staving off a more serious illness. We'll see over the next couple of days whether I was successful or not.

As for the dance itself, it wasn't nearly as bad as I imagined it might be. Of course, as I told a friend, I had anticipated scenes from a post-apocalyptic world where all morals had been discarded, so there was no where to go but up. Maybe I'm not as easily shocked as others. Maybe I simply didn't see the decadence going on. But of the 2100 (!) students attending the dance, only a handful of them seemed intent on reenacting acts meant for the bedroom.

Now I don't have great experience with school dances, having grown up in a pre-enlightened Church of the Nazarene where pre-marital sex was frowned upon because it might lead to dancing. My church went so far as to provide homecoming and prom "alternatives." For the uninitiated, these were similar to school dances in that they involved finding a date, buying a corsage, dressing up, going to a fancy dinner and staying out until the wee hours of the morning. The only thing missing was the dancing. We even had our share of drama (we were teenagers, after all).

So being a good Nazarene, I never set foot at an official high school dance (at least, until after I graduated from high school, but I mentioned that already). Most of my non-Nazarene friends had difficulty grasping the problem - heck, even some of my Nazarene friends had a hard time understanding it. Looking back, it does seem a bit ridiculous to call dancing sinful, especially since it's mentioned so many times in the Bible, most of the time in a positive manner. But being a member of the Nazarene church, I felt it was my responsibility to live up to the standards they had set forth in the Bible...er...Manual. Even if I didn't agree with them.

But the truth was, dancing was never a huge temptation for me. Rare was the time I found myself with the burning desire to "get my groove on," so to speak. Some of that was due to my religious upbringing (I say religious because I don't remember my parents ever telling me it was wrong to dance). Some of that was due to my lack of confidence with girls. Some of that was due to my uncomfortableness with my body. But I was reminded Saturday night the main reason I did not go to dances...

The music is abysmal.

Seriously. Made me want to grab a random corsage and jam the pin into my ear to stop the madness. Most of the "songs" (and I use that term loosely) were stunning in their boringness. Didn't help that during the four hours of the dance, they only played three songs I have on my iPod (for the curious: Journey's "Don't Stop Believing;" Michael Jackson's "Thriller;" and Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me"). The rest were unremarkable, minus two absolute travesties: "Cotton-Eyed Joe: remix" and a dance medley of hairband hits (imagine AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Guns 'n Roses over a dance beat. Trust me, it's worse than you can imagine).

Other than that, my first dance as a chaperone was, for the most part, a positive experience. I could have done without the oppressive humidity in the arena (was so bad, it started to drip from the ceiling. I'll let your stomach churn over that image). And standing for over five hours made me long for my comfy chair. But it was actually fun seeing my students dressed up. You could see the adults they will become in a few years lurking just below the surface. And it was an ego boost to see them get excited over seeing you there. Yet what I'll probably remember most, and what I most regret from not going to dances in high school, was the sense of joy that permeated the event. When the songs everyone knew (everyone but me, of course) came on, teenagers came from every corner to fill the dance floor, throw their troubles into the humid gym air and lose themselves in an expression of joy. Or to sway quietly in the darkened arena, aware only of the arms draped about your neck, the eyes staring into yours. We all need to do that sometimes. If onlythey would play some decent music to go along with it...Æ

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Now playing: Big Star - Back of a Car
via FoxyTunes