Dance The Night Away

I'll be the boy
In the corduroy pants
You be the girl
At the high school dance
-Tom Petty (You Wreck Me)

Earlier this year, my 15-year old went to his first school dance¹. That alone was mind-cramping in that a) it still feels like he’s our little firstborn, and b) I can’t possibly be old enough to have a 15-year old.

To ask his date, he was fortunate to have a bunch of his cool, older cousins around to help him do it with some swagger. He showed up to the girl’s door, lying sideways across the arms of about five or six 20somethings, like some kind of 21st century pharaoh. She said yes.

I’ve been told that only in Utah do we ask to dances “with flair.” Everyone else just calls (texts? Snaps?) or asks in person, with neither pomp nor circumstance. In Utah, we do it a little different. The asking is a production. As is the answering. Once, I got answered via a multi-phase treasure/scavenger hunt with various cryptic clues across multiple locations. I mean, by the time you read the first clue, you already know the answer is yes (unless you happened to ask a sadist), but you have to play along because THAT’S WHAT YOU DO². At some point, we found ourselves (my friend Billy and I together because we had asked two best friends), two dumb 17-year olds standing in front of the Delta Gamma house, trying to get a clue from the two sorority girls who answered the door and seemed to derive pleasure from making us work (there’s your sadism).

All of this to say: asking (and answering) to dances can get exhaustingly involved.

My friend Lauren asked me to what would’ve been my first dance. I say “would’ve been” because I said no. Not because I wanted to say no, mind you. I still think the world of Lauren to this day. I said no because, in 90’s Mormonism, the rule of thumb (more³? tradition? pamphlet recommendation?) was that you’re not supposed to date until you turn 16. The majority of my friends (and their parents) didn’t worry too much about said rule of thumb. But my dad was Stake President, which basically means he was the ecclesiastical leader who oversees about 8 geographically-grouped congregations. And he knew that if The Son of The Ecclesiastical Leader Who Oversees About 8 Geographically-Grouped Congregations ignored the rule? Well, kids throughout the 8 Geographically-Grouped Congregations would point to that as their ammunition. He was basically doing a solid to the rule-following parents within the stake. I argued with him but, like many before me, I knew it was a lost cause.

I think I wrote a note to Lauren, with an apology and probably a generic explanation. Pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to bear saying “no” in person. We talked about it later and it turned out ok, I suppose. But it felt big and stupid at the time. Teenagers can be dramatic.

Once I turned the acceptable age of 16, my friend Jenni asked me to the first dance I could actually go to—Sadie Hawkins, the one where you wear matching shirts with your date. I felt like a rookie, everybody else having a few dances under their belts. We got Italian food at Baci. I told my go-to fettuccine Alfredo story, which I’d had in the chamber ever since learning we were getting Italian. It’s thoroughly gross, but in a slapstick kind of way. I wouldn’t call it a classic, but it’s done the trick once or twice.

Jennie⁴—with an e—was the first girl I ever asked to a dance. Or out at all. (My group of guy friends didn’t do a lot of non-school-dance dating.) When I went to pick her up, driving my parents’ Ford Explorer with my friend Alex all dapper in the backseat, I was hosting a nasty little flesh wound—courtesy of a hasty shave job— right in that tight corner where your nostril starts to stick out from your face. It would not stop bleeding. I was dabbing it with an increasingly-red Kleenex the whole way. But nothing could stop the red tide.

I didn’t know what to do. The show had to go on.

I walked up, rang her doorbell. Dabbed like crazy right up until I heard the doorknob shifting and I stuffed the Kleenex in my pocket.

“Hi, I’m here to pick up Jennie…”
'‘Of course, let me go get her…”

Dab. Dab. Dab. Footsteps. Stuff Kleenex back into pocket.

(give her the bouquet) “Hey! Wow, you look amazing.”
“Thank you.”

Her parents wanted to get a photo of their beautiful daughter and her secretly hemorrhaging date. I pretended to cough and tried to secretly dab again. “Say cheese.” Secret dab. “Cheese.”

Finally her parents said goodbye and we headed to the car.

I realized I had a choice to make: 1) keep trying to maintain this stealth-dabbing charade. Or 2) come clean.

I came clean.

“I gotta tell you: I cut myself SO BAD when I was shaving. Look at this.”

I uncovered the gash, tilted my chin up so Jennie could get a proper look at the minor carnage. She looked. She started laughing. But good laughing. Nice laughing. Oh Poor You laughing. Remind me why I wanted to go to a dance with her laughing. WITH laughing. Not AT laughing.

“I figure we can go to the E.R. after dinner, right?”

What seemed like nightmare rotten luck, a worst case scenario, turned into the perfect icebreaker. It disarmed us both and, watching her laugh, chilled me out for sure.

I did stop bleeding eventually.

1. Homecoming. But they all call it HoCo which make me itch.

2. The irony of this particular Multi-Phase, Multi-Location Answer is that it was the one and only time I had asked a girl to a dance the old-fashioned way. I had just called her up. What happened was, I had tried to ask two other girls (not at the same time, c’mon!) and been beaten to the punch by about an hour for the first and mere minutes for the second. So there I was, a week before my senior year homecoming dance—which seems like not that big of a deal now, but, like many teenage things, felt outsizedly big then—and I still didn’t have a date. I had sorta decided it was fine and was gonna sit this one out. But then I heard that a girl who was sort of a friend of mine (meaning: my group of dudes and her group of girls often hung out on weekends) but had been dating one of my friends for most of high school (and, as sometimes happens, with youthful exclusivity agreements, meant that the two of us weren’t, like, tight) hadn’t been asked by said friend. And so I pictured this girl, sitting at home alone during the last homecoming of her high school career. And I picked up my insecure (two strikes, man! It takes courage to ask ONE girl, much less two! And then to get a NO?!?! TWO NO’S?!?! My self-esteem was subterranean at that point) heart and decided to call her up to see if she wanted to go. This was amazing because I had never once called her before that. And never would after, either. It was awkward and hilarious.

ME: Hey, this is Paul. How’s it going?
HER: Oh, hey. It’s good. Just doing some homework.
ME: Oh, yeah. Same. (Trying desperately to have some social skills and to not just leap to the point.) So…for what class?
HER: Um, English. We have that essay due tomorrow.
ME: Right, right. I should work on that too (super nervous laugh).
HER:
ME:
HER:
ME: So, um, who asked you to Homecoming?
HER: I’m not actually going. I haven’t been asked.
ME: (overdoing the surprise) No way! Really? I can’t believe that.
HER: No, really. I haven’t been asked.
ME: Crazy! Well, I actually don’t have a date. We should go. Would you wanna go with me?
HER: Oh, that would be great.
ME: Let’s do it.
HER: OK.
ME: OK.
HER: Well, good luck on your essay.
ME: Right. See you at school.
HER: Bye.

We both knew why I was calling and, business accomplished, could not get off the phone fast enough.

I figured that was her answer and was, thus, surprised when I got yanked into a full-on multi-zip-code scavenger hunt.

The dance was actually quite nice, though. Neither of us felt any pressure to try to make it romantic or anything. We just hung out. I’m pretty sure we didn’t even slow dance, which was ok by me.

3. Pronounced like the eel. MORAY.

4. And, no joke, I later went to a Christmas dance with my childhood friend Jenny. Parents in 1975-76 were really feeling the name Jennifer. And I covered all the spellings.