News item: Students in Port Angeles, Washington, are boycotting high school dances because of rules known as Face to Face, Leave Some Space.
The rules not only require students to leave a visible gap between one another when slow dancing, but ban back-to-front dancing, which school officials said could lead to inappropriate grinding.
This raises two immediate questions: A) what would appropriate grinding look like, and B) where's Kevin Bacon when you need him?
Apparently Port Angeles need a little Footloose action, someone to offer up an empty grist mill across the county line where the kids can bump and grind, or at least grind, away from the prying eyes of the Tango Taliban.
According to the Peninsula Daily News, Port Angeles High cancelled last Saturday's Spring Fling after only 15 tickets sold. In October, dozens walked out of class to protest the new rules, and the annual homecoming dance fizzled.
Student representatives complained the new decree even meant no conga line or bunny hop.
This is not just a Port Angeles issue.
The face-to-face edict is being enforced in schools throughout the U.S. because, gosh, there's no threat, real or imagined, that the land of the free can't regulate into submission.
In fairness to school authorities, they are trying to deal with a relatively new challenge. In the olden days, we didn't have to contend with back-to-front freaking (or, as it was called back then, "sexual assault").
Nor was there a need for the "leave some space" rule, since the space was generally from one side of the gym to the other, girls and boys propping up opposite walls. Every once in a while some poor gormless schmuck would gather the nerve to cross the great divide to ask the prettiest girl in school to dance, she would scrape him off the bottom of her shoe, and he would make the lonely, humiliating, three-day hike back across the floor, the band playing Smoke On The Water as a funeral march.
The boy would then guzzle a smuggled mickey of lemon gin before becoming violently ill on the basketball court, passing into blissful unconsciousness after a few minutes of the dry heaves. This was known as "having a great time."
When couples eventually did hit the floor the result bore less resemblance to Dirty Dancing than The Walking Dead, a self-conscious zombie shuffle, with the exception of the occasional kid energetically bopping away like Mick Jagger, or at least what Mick would look like should someone toss a toaster in his bathtub.
Then the band would play Stairway To Heaven and the girls would avoid eye contact. ("It's like a bear. Pretend you re dead and he'll go away.")
Of course, every once in awhile a couple would not only dance cheek to cheek (as opposed to crotch to cheek) but cross the line between waltzing and making out, leading the teachers to wade in and pull them apart like linesmen breaking up a hockey fight.
Freaking might be new. Teenage lust is not.
If Port Angeles school trustees are fretting, it might be because of their own memories of Paradise By The Dashboard Light. Or maybe the face-to-face rules really do reflect an assumption that today's youth are even more lecherous than they were (when adults use the phrase "today's youth," the implication is that, like JPEG photos, they are a poor imitation of what came before, losing quality with each generation).
They might consider emulating most B.C. school districts, where students are governed not by blanket rules that treat them all like sex-crazed rottweilers keen to mount the letter carrier the moment you let them off the leash, but by a general code of conduct that boils down to showing respect for others.
This does not mean high school dances become porn movies. It means you cannot micro-manage kids to either safety or wisdom. Rather than smothering them in bubble wrap, forcing them into burkas, buying GPS trackers to monitor their driving habits, or forcing them to dance stiff-armed as a Von Trapp, how about imparting good values and trusting them to make smart choices on their own?
Or, as an alternative, there are always chastity belts.
