Wanted: Dance Chaperones

And We Danced - Hooters (mp3)
Get Low - Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz (mp3)

Wanted: High School Dance Chaperones

Must be on staff of school. Must be willing to stand and watch teenagers dance for extended periods of time, including girls age 15-18 in ridiculously tight-fitting dresses, but finding the scene neither arousing nor disgusting, but rather merely just what teenagers do these days. Especially teenagers with overly-permissive parents who apparently don’t mind their daughters looking like expensive escorts from Thailand or some poor section of what used to be Russia.

Must be willing to say the following to teenagers jacked up on hormones:

• “Please stop grinding” up to 20 times, knowing full well they will go back to grinding as soon as you are more than five feet removed from their presence
• “Please consider returning your skimpy dress down to its intended location, thus covering your backside and preventing your thong from being seen by others”
• “No I was not looking at your girlfriend’s bare ass”
• “OK yes, I was looking at her ass, but only because it’s my job. And because you were showing it to me and everyone else and even using your hands to point to where I should apparently be looking. And I’m asking you to remedy the situation so that I may no longer have the free show”
• “No I do not enjoy this job. I needed the Christmas money because I’m a teacher, you little prick”
• “Yes, when you’re in college, you can fellate yourself in the main quad for all I care, and you can have group orgies disguised as a dance in your frat basement, but this dance is organized and sponsored by an educational not-for-profit institution, and we are in some small way responsible for your behavior while at this event”
• “No, we’re not violating your fucking privacy. You have no privacy on a dance floor”
• “No, the $30 you paid for you and your date does not purchse you the right to do whatever you like while you’re here”
• “Yes, it is our business. Now please cover up your girlfriend’s breasts so that I can go back to looking you in the eye when we’re talking”
• “And say no to drugs”

If you are capable of saying these things to sometimes large teenage males and their dates -- young innocent flowers who certainly have no responsibility whatsoever in these acts because they almost never say anything in protest or anger but merely shrug and return to their grinding activities -- please apply as soon as possible. We’re running short on adults willing to do this job.

Sincerely,
the School Administration

Yes, this was inspired by my weekend. I again chaperoned one of our dances. And all reasonable minds seem to agree that, as high school dances nationwide go, ours is relatively tame. (Then again, so was the tiger that mauled Sigfried's pal Roy.)

At the end of the dance, we all decided the grinding at this year’s event was less disturbing and less all-encompassing than it had been at last year’s event. However, considering a ban was enacted on grinding at dances, and considering that decision was made by and demanded by people who were nowhere to be found chaperoning this event, I found myself getting angrier the farther I get from the experience.

One of the boys, an absolutely great kid who danced in completely appropriate ways the entire evening -- hell, he even actually talked to and looked his date in the eyes -- told me, “I really don’t see how anything we do out here is your business. I know you’re all claiming to look out for us, but I think it’s pretty clear we can take care of ourselves, and all you’re doing is proving to these guys that you’re out of touch.”

His honesty was painful, refreshing, and downright infuriating the farther I get from it. His generation is more sexually responsible and no more slutty than any recent previous generation, from what I've read on the subject. So maybe he has a point. But he's also rubbing my face in it. Literally. And I'm not getting paid enough to have his point rubbed in my face, not by a longshot.

No matter. His point won't scare me away. I’ll be attending every single dance I can when my daughters hit high school. They’ll get their friggin’ dance floor privacy when they move far far away to college.

The Voluntary Virus

Fire and Rain - James Taylor (mp3)
Ghosts - Fanfarlo (mp3)

Most of the time, when we talk of the Internet and things “going viral,” there’s this sense that those of us who get sucked in are somehow victims. As if we unwittingly or unknowingly caught this contagion that’s out there in the open, like germs floating through our shared cyber-oxygen.

This week, however, I have witnessed the singularly biggest voluntary virus of my techno-life. A fellow high school alum, two years my junior, started a Facebook Group (newly redesigned to show up in your stream) with the title of “If you went to (our school), you remember when...”

He started this group last Saturday night. July 30. As of Monday morning, it had over 300 members. As of Tuesday afternoon, it was quickly approaching 500.

This isn’t a public page. It has a moderator. The only way you can get in is to be invited or to request, and he’s only accepting members who attended one of two local high schools.

This one group is the single most explosive and dangerous and amazing and successful social media outreach campaign our school could never have ever devised on its own because we are, as an entity, afraid that exactly what is happening might happen.

Which is to say, at least ⅔ of the memories and stories and commentaries which populate the group are grossly unflattering. They talk of drinking, smoking, partying. They talk of bad teachers, awful teachers, incompetent teachers. They brag of illegal activities, immoral activities, merely wild and crazy activities.

And we’re not talking a few pages. On Monday, I expanded all comments and opened all posts so that every comment to every entry from the start of the group onward was exposed, and it became an 86-page PDF. By Tuesday night, it was closer to 130 pages. Members are adding comments and “starter memories” to the site at the rate of 10-20 each hour.

A vast majority of the group’s members are graduates between 1986-1996, although as the group grows, so does the age range, little bit by little bit.

It’s become this huge, instant, online, multigenerational campfire.

We’re all sitting around it telling stories and naming names from our memories, and everyone else is reacting to them. It’s bigger than the biggest church camp campfire I’ve ever seen. Firewood keeps piling on, and the flames keep generating plenty of heat and sparks, and the marshallows keep roasting, and the cheesy Kumbaya songs keep playing (sometimes in rounds!).

Best of all, there’s no counselors. It’s just campers, free to say whatever the f*#k they feel like without giving a flip what the stupid adults say.
Unfortunately, I’m one of the adults. I’m like that camper who had to grow up and become one of the camp’s leaders, and I’m squatting behind one of the trees on the fringes of the crowd, hiding from the heat and the light, but enjoying the ecstatic communal nature of the event as best I can from my secret vantage point.

If I reveal myself, I’m required to represent the school rather than my former student self and my former student memories.

The longest single thread, by far, had reached 110 comments by Tuesday night and focused on the surreal suicide of a student some 20 years ago, an event that was simultaneously very public yet also shrouded in mystery and rumor and myth. I’ve read every comment, many of them twice. Some are grossly inaccurate. Others come in and try to correct, to offer their versions, their memories. The collective, amazingly, gets close to the truth of things once you read them all together, even if some of them prove to be either naive or insensitive or just excruciatingly idiotic.

Several guys confessed that they got very emotional just reading through the comments, as did I. I knew the boy, and I remembered hearing about it as a freshman in college, and I remember reading the detailed confidential investigative reports when I started my job. I wanted so badly to tell some guys they were full of crap and others that they had most of it right, but instead, I had to just read, and take quick, gaspy breaths, and stay hidden behind that tree.

I don’t know how long this campfire will last, when the kindling will disappear, when the campers will yawn and dissipate, making their ways back to their cabin beds before their parents come to pick them up in the morning.

I only know that, no matter how long it goes, it’s been the single most amazing cyber-campfire I’ve ever seen ignite on my computer screen, and it’s been absolutely, perfectly imperfectly beautiful.

Scorched Earth

Fire Escape - Fanfarlo (mp3)
Mean to Me - Tonic (mp3)

Any reasonable, average, non-celebrity person should find the latest adventures of Charlie Sheen great and terrible entertainment. He is a walking cautionary tale reminding us that being reasonable, average, and non-celebrity ain’t so bad.

Lest we lose our own bearings, Charlie Sheen is only the latest and most buzzworth cautionary celebrity tale du jour. He is not some weird outlier. He is one of a legion of stars whose lives mirror the melodramas and poorly-scripted flicks and shows in which they “perform” fictitiously.

The sobering realization I’ve had recently is that these moments of abject public idiocy are not restricted to celebrities. The Average Joes and Josephinas in my life are, within the confines of our more limited budgets, just as susceptible.

My acquaintances don’t generally pass out on rehearsal dinner tables or vomit from alcohol poison at trustee meetings. Most of my acqaintances are smart enough to avoid doing something on a camera or before a live audience. Unfortunately, we have another sort of public venue that’s open even more often than Waffle House: Facebook.

The most recent Facebook car wreck involved very recent graduates from the lovely school where I work. One of our more respected and esteemed grads, a very devout Christian from a very devout family, knocked up his girlfriend. The two of them began owning up to this fact through semi-subtle Facebook status updates. She wrote that her boyfriend would make a great father. She wrote that after much soul-searching, she and her boyfriend were prepared to take on greater responsibility and that God had blessed them.

I’ve never read a handbook on how to best handle the marketing and public relations challenge of knocking up a teenage girl. Perhaps hiding away from the rest of the world is cowardly or unrealistic. I doubt there’s a good way to handle it, especially if you’re going to have the baby and possibly get married.

(Abortion, on the other hand, makes these decisions easy: pretend like everything is normal, that nothing happened, and suffer behind a lonely wall of shame and guilt for as long as it takes to forget about the entire thing.)

Anyway, the fit hit the shan when one of this boy’s classmates posted a status update that basically celebrated this turn of events. “I love it when a Christian kid has his come-uppance,” was the general gist of the message.

Three days later, this one glib smirky smart-assed moment was the centerpiece of 115 comments and unknown, untold hours of conversation between unknown hundreds of adults, former classmates and various other connections lucky or unlucky enough to be “Friends of Friends” of this young man.

The slings and arrows thrown inside this string of commentary were barbed and brutal. A Christian girl coming to the defense of the to-be-parents tells the author about 10 different ways he could make love to himself or a farm animal. The author tells the girl she has developed especially good skills at pleasuring boys with her mouth and publicizing the events.

Another Christian friend offers numerous different ways the author can have intercourse with himself or other inappropriate objects. The author retorts that he loves the Christian hypocrisy and then follows with a string of well-spelled expletives of his own.

And so it goes. The author gains several dozen friends in 48 hours, all hoping to jump in with their commentary. The Christians the author seeks to damn with claims of hypocrisy serve his aims by proving their own very unChristian responses. They think they're defending their friend, but they're damning their faith.

Meanwhile, the author's current freshman college classmates view it all with ironic Yankee glee, mocking the predictable small-minded small-town Intelligent Design pregnant couple on a tractor and the Footloose homebound high schoolers who come to their rescue.

As I rubbernecked from the comfortable remove of an adult on the fringes, I found a few silver linings. All of the comments were remarkably well-composed for cyber-vitriol. One of the boys who managed to prove himself so chronically self-involved as to live on his own planet showed up near the end and wrote some of the most reasonable and measured commentary.

And then, the father to be, the fallen Christian soldier who sullied his name and his religion, showed up. I can't imagine scripting a better response for him than he wrote for himself. It was apologetic and humble and calm and completely absent of all foul language. Maybe I wouldn't have gone quite so over the top with the Jesus references, but that's a nit-pick.

In the crisis moment, the father to be in three responses kept holding fast to the kinds of words that made you realize why so many went to bat for him.

Sure, he comes from a wealthy family. He and his likely soon-to-be-wife will both likely have the opportunity to finish college. Their newborn child will likely be raised as much by grandparents as parents for the first couple of years. These advantages are indisputable, but that shouldn't discount the fact that plenty of others facing this situation would fall terribly short of impressive or fail outright.

He made lemonade out of lemons.

The author proved himself shallow and far too giddy at the very real nightmare of someone he knew well. He clearly didn't understand how someone as intelligent and witty as himself could have fallen shy of being worshiped by his high school classmates, and even if those who had such respect had earned it with sincerity, he was going to enjoy watching them fall regardless.

I doubt he'll be back for the 5-year reunion. But I suspect his one flippant comment of some seven words will still be discussed in his absence, even four years from now. He won't be missed. I suspect he'll still have plenty of burdensome chips on his shoulders.

He's our own little Charlie Sheen.

Scenes from a High School Dance, Part III

Butterfly Thing - Tanya Donelly (mp3)

SCENE ONE
SCENE TWO

Scene Three: An Ante-Chamber
Three hours into the dance

I exit the ballroom area and walk into a side area. During adult parties, this is where they set up the bars and where people escape the music to chat. At this point in the evening, it has become the resting place of the rejected and dejected. The sad sophomore boys who came solo in the vain hopes of catching romantic lightning in a bottle now realize how stacked against them the odds were. They have found solace in the comfort of shared misery. Their faces aren’t some doomed cloud of depressed angst, but rather the look you often see on a 1-15 basketball team. They aren’t in despair so much as resigned to their fates.

I walk up to them and ask how it’s been. They shrug and smile and say Fine and Good. What’s the point in giving me, the clueless adult, more information than that? “No luck, huh?” I say. They shrug and shake their heads and keep drinking their glasses of water. In my mind I travel back 20 years and think, This is where I’d be sitting, having a conversation about Rush or ping-pong or the X-Men...

Sitting on a window ledge, the window open and looking out to the expansive town of Chattanooga below, is a young girl, probably a sophomore. Her dark purple dress keeps catching a little of the cold breeze, and she’s mouthing the words to the only slow song Paramore has ever recorded (that I know of), the one song all night the DJ played for a “slow dance.” It’s called “The Only Exception.” Can’t say I saw that one coming as The Slow Song of the Night.

Looking perhaps a little too long, I realize she’s crying. The storyline possibilities flood my head. Did she get dumped? Did she come alone? Is she wondering just how far she would fall if she just leaned a little further out the window? Can I get a what what?

Calmly I walk over, not wanting to scare or annoy her and hating to break into her private melodrama but feeling somehow obligated. “Hey sweetheart... everything OK?” I say. (Yeah, I know it was sexist, and I wish I could have found a better way to refer to her, but I wasn’t saying it like Dabney friggin’ Coleman. I was saying it like someone who has daughters and who could see his own daughter, years down the line, sitting in that damn windowsill and mouthing words out into the cold air in the hopes that some Romeo was down below, within earshot, and capable of reading the heart and feelings of a lost girl, capable of swooping into that miserable dance, taking her hand, leading her to the dance floor, and watching as the mass parted in awe of his charm and beauty, as they danced some immortal Beauty & the Beast waltz so stunning the crowd was reduced to tears.)

She dries up so quickly you could almost be convinced she was never actually crying. “Oh yeah, yeah,” she says, nodding insistently. “I just love this song soooo much.”

“Really?” I ask. I want to reach out and put a hand on her shoulder, but... well, there’s about 20 legal reasons why I don’t.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Thanks!” She says it with an exclamation point attached. As in, please leave, thanks! As I nod, conceding the fight, and back away, she looks back out the window into the darkness. She will wait until I’m farther away before mouthing more lyrics.

Meanwhile, I’m reminded that girls -- all teenagers, for that matter -- don’t need a break-up or a specific moment of rejection to want to sit on a windowsill, stare into the wide open pitch, see their breath cloud up and move out, and feel miserable. Every day in a teenager’s life offers dozens of moments where intense and extreme joy or sorrow or fear can grip every fiber in their being.

And there we are, semi-helpless witnesses to their dramas, offering a feeble and uncertain hand or ear, but mostly just hoping the power of our sideline sympathizing keeps them afloat for another day, another month, another year, until things get better. We hope.


SCENE ONE
SCENE TWO

Scenes from a High School Dance, Part II

Let's Dance to Joy Division - The Wombats (mp3)

SCENE ONE


Scene Two: The Lobby
Two hours into the dance

Outside in the lobby where half of the adults are gathered, a young English teacher and I joke about the dancing. I tell him I envision a packed emergency room where dozens of boys have entered to deal with “third-degree friction burns to their crotchal reagions.” He mocks my use of the invented word “crotchal” and says they probably use number codes for it. We’ve got another 352 out there! Those kids... they just won’t stop grinding... they won’t stop until someone dies from crotchal burns!

A teacher from the other school, a woman my age who graduated my same year, walks over to us looking flabbergasted. “We just walked through the middle of the dance crowd. It’s. Awful. Awe. Full. There was a boy with his hand all over his date’s breast and another girl with her dress hiked up so high I could see her panties.”

We all look at each other and sigh and shrug and all but communicate an acceptance of how powerless and clueless we are to the teenage world. Mostly I’m thinking I’m glad I didn’t have to see the girl’s panties, because then I’m forced to either ignore it or be the pervert who noticed it. Lose lose situation.


I’m lost in my reverie when she calls my name. “You need to tell your headmaster to talk to your students about this.” I raise an eyebrow. Was she serious?

“Seriously, there’s no excuse for them behaving like that out there. He should talk to them.”

I try to picture that. Our headmaster, on the verge of 60 with shock-white hair and his calming voice, trying to tell a collective group of 600 adolescent boys how they should dance. He could close with the Scary Anecdote, a version of one of those anti-smoking or anti-meth commercials that hope to discourage through fear.

“Boys, let me tell you a story. Two years ago, after a dance just like this one, I was in the ER all night, sitting at the bedside of a boy. We’ll call him Timmy. Timmy was dying. He was dying because he spent the entire night in cotton underwear and dress pants, grinding his privates into the backside of his date.

Unbeknownst to Timmy as he enjoyed the feel of his manhood nestled between his date’s welcoming cheeks, the constant and never-ceasing friction was removing one layer of skin cells after another. You might not know this, but the penis has far fewer skin layers than the rest of the body. That’s why it’s so sensitive. And poor Timmy, so excited to be dry-humping a girl to the sounds of Usher, chose to ignore those slight hints of pain his body kept sending to his brain.

Five hours later, I’m by his side in the ER, and he’s on fluids and on the verge of death, and what for? For 90 minutes of poorly-simulated sex friction. Yes, Timmy lived, but barely. And he’s been afraid to dance ever since. Don’t be like Timmy. Take care of yourselves. Look your date in the eye once in a while. Dance with her straddling one of your legs to the sounds of ‘Low’ by Flo Rida, letting both of your bodies sink towards the floor while she grinds her personal parts into your right thigh.

Or, better yet, dance in large circles of six or seven of your peers to songs by REM or the Violent Femmes. The ladies totally dig that.”

And I can see this teacher, a woman who has clearly forgotten her own behavior patterns some 20 years earlier, hearing this speech and smiling and nodding and saying to everyone, “Finally. Someone’s teaching these stupid kids a lesson.”

SCENE THREE

Scenes from a High School Dance, Part I

Kiss Kiss - Chris Brown (mp3)

Scene One: The Dance Floor
One hour into the school’s semiformal.

A third of the expansive ballroom is packed with the dancing cyst, a cancerous and growing cluster of teenage cells, crammed tightly into a roundish mass. The steady bass thump of a dozen different songs gently nudges the winterized windows. The collective occasionally shouts out a memorable chorus. The girls out-shout the boys.

Faculty supervisors prowl the perimeter like hyenas. Instead of seeking the wounded and vulnerable, they slink around to find those pre-adult lifeforms who might be having what can only be described as “too much fun.” Anyone making out? Any hands getting personal with another person’s private regions in a too-public manner? When a teacher sniffs out such a moment, they enter the fray and pounce, demanding that the couple in question lower their degree of enjoyment to get more in line with the rest of the group.

It feels like we are the bad guys. Maybe we are.

One teacher says she looks for the boys whose shirts are untucked. Rumor has it that boys untuck their shirts and unzip their fly, thus allowing their date to reach behind and offer a “tug job” during a dance. Really? I ask. “Oh you have no idea. Girls talk.” I hope she’s wrong. About the shirts, not the girls talking.

One teacher in his early 30s stands in one spot almost the entire night, near an open window a mere 10-15 feet from the dancing cancer. He just can’t get over the monotany of it. “Look out there. All of them are dancing exactly the same. All of them.”

I observe. He’s exaggerating, but not much. Boy after boy stands behind his date, pushed into her, his hands on her hips or on her waist, their combined form attempting to rock left and right in some close proximity to the rhythm and to the movements of their partner. Entire songs, entire stretches of songs, go by, and these couples remain in the exact. same. positions. They don’t seem to talk much. They don’t even have to deal with eye contact or facial expression, because they’re not even looking at one another. Probably 8 out of every 10 couples dance like this.

One particularly sad case catches our eye. A boy already 4-5” shorter than his date is further insulted by her wearing 3” heels. In a desperate attempt to match the grinding power of his more evenly-heighted peers, he is up-thrusting his hips with every beat. He looks like a Chihuahua attempting to mate with a German Shepherd. And, appropos of the metaphor, the poor German Shepherd mostly ignores him and rolls her eyes, wondering when some bigger dog might rip out this annoying mutt’s throat.

At one point, the teacher and I notice that six different couples are lined up, unintentionally, doing exactly the same thing in the same rhythm. “They look like a family of penguins,” I say.

Scene Two

When the Truth Doesn't Matter... Kinda

Lazy Eye - Silversun Pickups (mp3)
Hazy Shade of Winter - Simon + Garfunkel (mp3)

My very first real honest-to-God girlfriend was a senior when I was a junior. She was a stud. She was built like an efficient brick shithouse, played soccer like a champ, and loved Van Halen, Dan Fogelberg, Indiana Jones and Jesus. “Carrie” was also salutatorian at the very large public school where my mother taught. She was socially clueless enough to find me attractive and interesting. One in a million, I tell ya.

We courted for three wonderful months. We dated for six. In the summer before my senior year, I broke up with Carrie. The reasons were lame but valid. And they were punctuated with this minor, insignificant detail that I'd spent two weeks at Governor's School romancing and eventually falling for a semi-psychotic but incredibly adventurous drama queen, someone who was in all ways the complete opposite of Carrie.

Carrie was back in Chattanooga writing me three to four letters each week, drawing little cartoons and cutting out ransom notes and writing bad limericks. I never wrote her once.

I broke up with Carrie the week I got back home, but it took two months of follow-up talks to settle the matter. She never could understand why I was breaking up, and I kept leaving out that little detail about Leigh. But Leigh and I had broken up before Carrie had finally accepted we were over, so I kinda had the chance to make up with her and never did.

I really had no desire to go back. In part because I was scum for lying to her so utterly and repeatedly... and in part because this girl, a very conservative and mature Christian, was simply too good for me.

Yeah so I'm defensive about it. Whatevs.

Cue the fast-moving clock. Move forward in time. Speed past our drifting apart once I get to college and become all but unreachable by family and friends from back home. Soar past our Christmas holiday dinner non-date when I'm a senior and we're awkward and both single but not feeling that thing that would transform a polite dinner into something more intense. Slip past the time we ran into one another on AOL and I tell her I'm engaged and will be married in three months and she immediately disconnects and never answers another email.

It's now the summer of 2010. I'm at a local dive watching the World Cup with my fellow blogger and 100 or so of my closest non-friends. I'm drinking a Bud Light Chelada for shits and giggles, my own form of Mad Men-esque rebellion of imbibing during the workday. (Don’t worry; it was just one freakin’ Chelada.)
Bob introduces me to a lawyer who works in the firm with his wife. Guy went to Red Bank. My mom taught him. He knew my ex-girlfriend. Small world yada yada. And then he says it.

"So weird about Carrie, right?"
"Weird what?" I say. 'Cuz I have no idea what he's talking about.
"I just can't believe she's gay. Never pictured her playing for the other team, you know?"

My reaction to all information I can't quite handle is very similar. If someone says the N-word in my presence, or if someone insults my mother's fidelity, or if someone says my Christian ex-girlfriend is gay, I just shrug and fake-chuckle and turn away and take another drink and try to pretend it didn't happen. It is the reaction of a non-confrontational coward, and I haven't been very good at doing anything about it.

Was it true? Is/was Carrie gay?

That night, when I was hopping around on Facebook, I searched for her name and found it. She was still living and working in Atlanta, but all other information was blocked from snooping eyes. So I sent her a long message. It updated her about my life, my family, my job, my hobbies. Everything someone who was happy not having anything to do with me for 20 years would be fine never knowing. God bless Facebook.

She never responded. Can't say I really expected her to.

So why does this stick in my craw? I don't really care if she's gay. Seriously, if she's married, or if she's celibate and uninterested in relationships, or if she's gay and dating Jane Lynch, none of it changes the way my heart reacts to her or my memories of her. If she's who she is, and if she's happy, then it's a good thing, and I would like knowing it.

Human nature. The Billy version is definitely screwed up. I want Carrie to be happy, but I also want to know I was written into her history book. But is my pathetic ego-trip enough to explain my desire to reconnect and find out?

Maybe I've convinced myself that if she was gay that I could absolve myself of messing around with another girl* while we were dating. I could excuse my unconscionable act with the faulty logic that I must've known something wasn't quite right with Carrie, something I just didn't understand in my clueless youth, and my straying was simply the product of a sixth-sense in my subconsciousness.

* “Messing around” isn’t code for kinky sex. “Messing around” wasn’t even petting. “Messing around” was strictly limited to kissing and groping over clothing. I never actually got my hands under the clothing covering female erogenous zones until one month before my wife got pregnant for the first time. OK, that’s exaggerated, but I was definitely in college.