The Fine Art of Slam Dancing

Taking a cue from some of the other middle schools in the area, we tried our first afternoon school dance this past Friday.

The idea was that the dance would start after school, thereby saving parents the trip to school to drop their kids off, and then another one to pick their kids up. It also ended at 4:30 so it was still light enough (although colder than all get out) for the walkers to walk home safely. The other idea is that the staff that helped on the dance would get home at a halfway decent hour, not 9:00 pm at night.

The Junior Civitan club sponsored the dance as a fundraiser and even pre-sold tickets Friday morning. Mr. Social Studies is one of the sponsors so he just gave us each 10 tickets and let us sell to our own homerooms - I found out later that over 400 tickets were pre-sold which is usually as many kids as we get to a dance anyway. They sold over a 100 that afternoon, so they did pretty well. They also saved money by not hiring a DJ - instead, one of the teachers hooked up her laptop to the speaker system in the gym and played tunes from there, which worked out great.

The kids were, however, really hyped up so we had our hands full keeping them in control. There were a few characters that Mrs. Language and I had to sit down on the bleachers for slamming into other kids. By the third time we'd had these two twerps on the bleachers, for the same stupid stunts, I'd finally lot my patience, especially when they protested that "we weren't doing anything wrong."

"Oh get over it!" I barked. "Your first clue you were doing something wrong was the first time we sat you down on the bleachers! But you don't learn from your first mistake, so you keep making it over and over again!"

"But we didn't..." they begin.

"And another thing," I continued. "I was slam dancing in all the punk clubs in L.A. in the late '70s and '80s before you were even born and you aren't even doing it right, for goodness sake! Heck you'd get the snot beaten out of you at a Sex Pistol's concert for out and out rudeness!"

Mrs. Language reported that by the time I'd finished my tirade their eyes had popped out of their heads and their mouths were hanging open.

One of them looks over at Goober Boy, one of my favorite kids from last year. He nods his head. "She's not kidding. She even plays the Ramones and the Clash in class."