Did You Ever Get Busted For Boppin?

One of the responsibilities of a high school teacher is to chaperone school dances. One of the responsibilities of a high school teacher's spouse is to be annually dragged to a high school dance in a four hour marathon of revulsion that resembles being exiled to a leper colony, except instead of laying around and dying like a decent human being, all the lepers were dry humping each other off tempo to a Britney Spears song.

I mean, I think we're being a little disingenuous here to be calling this pagan ritual "a dance," because nothing of the sort takes place. For instance, I can't dance at all, but I can slowly rotate in a circle while holding a girl at roughly arm's length. Room was left for the Holy Ghost, and as a result I was able to hold onto God's approval and my virginity well into college. My point is it that whatever else it was, it wasn't dancing. And while I'm happy to see this most sacred of traditions persevere amidst "the youth," one wonders if the little rascals actually think what they're doing is somehow breaking the mold. Hymens and parental illusions, perhaps, if one judges by the proximity with which they writhe, but these kids certainly aren't dancing. All they do is bend their knees slightly and shift their weight from heel to heel with varying degrees of velocity and success. Then they just stack on each other like legos: a few of this, a few more of that, click that last piece in, and you have a perfect model of the herpes simplex virus. Isn't that wonderful? And filthy. Don't forget filthy.


But I doubt you need me to remind you of these things. So let's instead, dearest reader, talk about the particulars of this latest bacchanalia. It was held in a car museum, and....no, that pretty much says it all. Hundreds of teens congregated in a stew of ProActiv, Axe Body spray, and flop sweat, surrounded by millions of dollars of pristine classic and luxury automobiles. Security was on hand, of course, but I'm unsure if the revelers appreciated that additional bodies were hired to see to the cars' safety while they themselves merited no such expenditure. After all, that's what we were there for. But apart from the ass-beating Kelly and I handed out on the Rock Band set up on the premises, at no other time were students in any significant danger.

I could go on and on, so I'll keep it to my top five favorite aspects of the dance, in no particular order:

1) A pack of five freshman boys who wandered around looking like Brendan Frasier in Blast From the Past: utterly fascinated by their surroundings and having no fucking idea how to proceed from there. Among them was a kid my height wearing a purple suit and a bowler hat, and another kid half as tall with feathered hair and a pure white tuxedo. Tre, tre magnifique.

2) The delicious irony that a significant fraction of the attendees were probably conceived in ill-considered bouts of fleeting passion on similar back-seats, hoods, perhaps even trunks, not two decades ago. And that a subsequent generation would be coming along in predictably similar fashion that very night.

3) A group of 43 students showed up in a chartered party bus. Because, you know, sometimes a Hummer limo just isn't ostentatious enough.

4) Amidst the many limos, a minivan drove up with a bemused father at the wheel. As he cued up behind a limo to drop off his young passengers, his head whipped around to the back seat, as if a shrill voice was asking him at that very moment why he was so determined to commit social suicide on his son / daughter's behalf. Looking mildly abashed, he quickly began to reverse in an attempt to leave the queue, and in so doing nearly hit a young couple walking behind him. The remainder of his time in my field of view was spent grimly staring ahead, knuckles white at the wheel, conducting an impromptu investigation into if a man might actually will himself from existence entirely through sheer force of determination. Much to his chagrin, he survived.

5) The venue also contained a horse made from melted down bumpers and proudly stood, its metallic hide glowing golden in the dim light, conspicuously between the boys' and girls' bathrooms. If any intrepid students had taken a page from their classical literature and stowed away inside the beast to avoid paying the price for admission, their desperate, muffled screams for release were obscured by the DJ's "dope-ass mix."


Kelly and I always take a picture together at these things, both because they're free for the chaperones, and because I have to do what she tells me, especially on her turf (and the earf is her turf). This time, however, despite her best efforts to maintain the tradition, we weren't able to do so. As a compensation, I have instead scanned and posted pictures of others at their high school dances. Yes, I still have these. No, I don't know exactly why. Yes, it is a good thing others of you didn't know me thirteen years ago. A damn good thing.


I wish I knew who started the rumor that any high school dance was a magical night. If you want a magical night, go see a Harry Potter movie or huff some paint. And if you want a terrifyingly magical night, do both.