Middle School Dances. Worse Than Ever.

Need a reminder of just how painful it was to be a tween or a young teenager? 

Here’s one: Middle school dances.

Remember those?

The sweat, the fear, the awkwardness? The pimples? The agony of watching your crush dance with someone else? The embarrassment of waiting to be asked to dance and no one asking? Feeling too fat, too skinny, too ugly, too short or too tall? Sometimes all at once?

Every insecurity was on display under the lights of the gym and the beady eyes of your science teacher.

I don’t care how old or decrepit I become, I’ll never wish to be 12 again. Back then I sported a Toni home perm that looked like a toilet brush on my head. I had Sasquatch feet that always mashed my partner’s toes. I was allowed to wear nylons with my mini skirts, but I wasn’t allowed to shave. That left me with weird swirls of hair on skinny legs. Delightfully simian.

Making matters worse, I had no rhythm.

Yet, in retrospect, those excruciating Saturday nights prepared us for life. During the three hours of blaring music and punch in waxy Dixie cups we learned to cope with disappointment, broken hearts and rejection, all while pretending to have fun.

Fast forward to 2020 and it looks like not much has changed for middle schoolers, except it seems adults have found a way to make dances worse than ever.

According to a story in The Salt Lake City Tribune, the policy at Rich County Middle School in northern Utah is that a child cannot decline an invitation to dance.

Chew on that for a minute.

Well-meaning, I’m sure. And designed, no doubt, by some sensitive man who still recalls the humiliation of being turned down by the class cutie and slinking back to the boys’ side of the room as couples started slow dancing.

But here’s how this no-one-says-no rule played out two weeks ago:

Azlyn Hobson was “thrilled and nervous” for the Valentine’s Day dance at Rich Middle School in Laketown in northern Utah’s Rich County, said her mother, Alicia.

“She was so excited for this dance. She was telling me about it for two weeks," Alicia Hobson said. "There was a boy at school she liked, she wanted to dance with him, she was going to have the best time ever."

But when some dude Azlyn didn’t like asked her for a dance she turned him down, only to have the principal intervene.

He was like, ‘You guys go dance. There’s no saying no in here,’ Azlyn recalled. The principal shooed them onto the dance floor for what Azlyn said was a painfully awkward partner dance.

"I just didn't like it at all," the 11-year-old said. "When they finally said it was done, I was like, ‘Yes!'"

Her mom posted an account of the forced frolic on her Facebook page.

“Girls HAVE to learn that they have the right to say no and that those around them have to respect that,” Mrs. Hobson wrote on Facebook. “I’m not going to quietly stand by while my daughter and all of her classmates are being wrapped up in rape culture. No way.”

Wow. That escalated quickly.

“We want to protect every child’s right to be safe and comfortable at school,” the principal countered in the newspaper. “We also believe that all children should be included in activities…make sure no kids feel like they get left out.”

Someone needs to remind this principal that these are hormonal pre-teens we’re talking about. Someone’s always getting left out. It’s what they do. Middle school is little more than a three-year re-enactment of “Lord of the Flies.”

I agree with Mom on this one. Not about the rape culture, but that forcing kids to dance with each other is creepy. And when boys ask girls, it means the girls lose their ability to wrinkle up their noses and shake their heads at the pubescent boys trying to drag them onto the dance floor.

If the everybody-gets-a-trophy mentality is taking over middle school dances - with girls as the trophies - it may be time to put these torturous events out of their misery. 

They seem even more insufferable now than they were when I was stomping around in size 10 shoes with a tumbleweed on my head.