Dirty dancing, the Holy Spirit and so on

Schools here in Lincoln and elsewhere are trying to get a handle on “dirty dancing” (http://bit.ly/bhc25u and http://bit.ly/bhzfKR), and youngsters are indignantly responding, as youngsters are wont to do, that their right to express themselves freely is being stomped on by The Man. Well, Good Lord, one would hope so. Hell, if we – The Man -- could get away with it, we’d lock ‘em up from 12 to 21, when they’re fit again to be set loose on civil society.

For those who are blissfully ignorant, dirty dancing is roughly the equivalent of a dog humping a leg or other object, except that it involves two human beings. As with so much behavior by young people, the conduct itself is bad enough, but it's Where It Could Lead -- unplanned pregnancies, young lives unfulfilled, children growing up in single-parent homes, construction of Chuck E. Cheeses on every corner -- that really terrifies those of us who only dimly remember our own teen years but what we do remember makes all the greater our grim resolve to clamp down on today's teens.

This is a far cry from the school dances of my youth – boys standing warily and awkwardly on one side of the gym, girls standing haughtily and out of reach (or so it appeared to us boys) on the other, with only a few making the occasional brave foray across the line, like soldiers negotiating no-man’s land, where they made bodily contact, if at all, only with clammy hands.

To be clear where my sympathies are, if I were in charge of school dances, I’d spray ice-cold water full blast through a fire hose across the dance floor every 15 minutes or so, bouncing these seething little cauldrons of hormones off the gym walls and shriveling anything that needed shriveling, if you catch my drift.

My wife and I have done a little chaperoning at Catholic school dances, where the standards are appropriately strict. But, of course, kids test those limits. They wouldn't be teenagers if they didn't. Girls' cleavage and dress length are carefully assessed and corrective action taken as needed; chaperones regularly pull boys and girls off the dance floor for excessive ardor; and if you turn the lights on in certain dark corridors, amorous couples scatter like panicked roaches.

Those couples who are pulled off the dance floor at my kids' school are sent to what's called a "reteaching room." There, the youngsters are taught to dance appropriately by an adult. They used to tell the kids they needed to leave room for the Holy Spirit between them when they danced. I don't know whether they still do, since some smart alecks pointed out that the Holy Spirit can take any form including, presumably, a very, very thin one.

It's probably a good thing I've not been asked to staff the reteaching room. I'd require young couples to leave room between them for a nun -- a really big, scowling, warty nun just back from six weeks' missionary work in the Congo with no time yet to bathe. Either that, or I'd say, "OK, boys on this side of the room, girls on that side. Stand there awkwardly for three hours, then go home."