Saturday night I had the opportunity to attend a high school Sweetheart Ball hosted by the local chapter of Job's daughters. Youth from high schools all over the valley were invited to attend. As my husband and I arrived early to learn our duty, I was greeted by one of the mothers who was in charge. She asked if I had been to a high school dance lately.
No.
She said dances now were not what we remembered, and then continued to relate stories of the debauchary of years past. Apparently when the Job's Daughters organization took over a couple of years earlier the dance was mostly an opportunity for lost and worldly youth to exploit each other.
The adults and youth in Job's Daughters worked hard to make this dance a more wholesome experience, and I must say that overall they succeeded last night. Yet it was still not a place that I really wanted to send my children.
I clearly see why most of the youth I know choose to save $30 instead of diving into Babylon for the night. Even when your date has clothes covering her body, instead of inching up or slipping down, nobody else's date does. And as they happily shake and rub their bodies against each other in a mild form of twerking, your mind and your desires can fight against where your spirit yearns to dwell and sink into filth and carnal emotion.
Throughout the night I had flash backs to my time in high school. The mother at the door was wrong, this was nearly exactly what I remembered parts of high school to be like.
Twenty nine years earlier almost to the day, I went to a Sweetheart Ball in at my high school. It was my first date. Shaun Nielson asked me. We went out with Jim Petrucka and his date, Tracy Noble. We went to Godfather's Pizza for dinner. I don't remember much other than the guys in an effort to be cool did something silly, and I kind of wondered why I had thought this would be so fun.
Being a teenager is fairly hard. You want to be grown up and cool. You want to be special. And sadly, as a teenager, you don't realize that you are special beyond measure.
After dinner we went to the dance. The most vivid memory of my first date occurred as we walked in to door. There before us, in plain sight of anyone, was a besutiful young lady and her date. Her dress back was at least half unzipped and his hands were all over her. We moved into the room and away from them.
We danced. And then we went home. And that was the end of that.
Except that as I stood around being a stogie old adult and breaking up the fun that couples believed they were having on Saturday, I had memories reviving in my mind. The 2014 evening of Dirty Dancing and every third song straight out of the eighties brought memories of Rock Springs High School back to me.
Last night as Thriller and Billie Jean played, I thought of a seminary trip to Utah. Thriller was fairly new and Ricky Lee was playing it on the bus. It was a fun trip. I suppose that something involving the gospel occurred, but mostly I remember some how getting the idea to run around Lagoon with Elaine Mattison and to get random young men to write their names and addresses in a little spiral notebook we found that day.
That was a wholesome memory that zipped through. But plenty of other memories washed in too. Memories of couples groping and making out in the school day halls. Clothes thst didn't quite cover bodies. Earrings that were every where. Drug deals going down as you came around a corner. A murder on campus. Class with a future murderer. And kids drinking all the time.
Talking to others who describe dances straight out of Napolean Dynamite, I have concluded I grew up in Babylon.
As a teenager, I wanted to fit in. I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted to be at parties having fun, but I knew what those parties were like and I didn't want to jump right into that pond of filth. An internal fight was always going on in me.
I kept higher standards and nobody invited me to social occasions. Mostly they really didn't tell me much either, except that one time when my choir dance partner, Dave, was basically playing three Catholic girlfriends of mine against each other as he dated at least one of them secretly while dumping another to date the third. I thought he was an idiot. I don't think I told him that though, because desperately I wanted him to ask me out too.
Saturday one of the other male chaperons wondered aloud why the girls allowed themselves to be used physical by the boys. (Apparently he got why the boys did it. Thst never came up.) He just didn't get the girls. But I did.
Teenage girls want to be loved. They feel awkward and ugly and they want some one, preferrably a boyfriend, to tell them that they are beautiful, special, and worthwhile.
Sadly most teenage boys are in about the same place and really have little to give towards validation of female worth.
The kids gyrating on the floor Saturday had no clue who they were or the infinite worth they already possesed.
I left the dance more determined to empower my children and others. Looking back, the thing that kept me from diving into Babylon head first was the knowledge that I was a daughter of infinite worth and value to a Supreme Father who had a plan for His children. That gave me the strength to walk away as Babylon lapped my feet. God blessed me beyond measure by saving me from situtions that would have changed my mortal life and made a return to Him less plesant. He didn't take away all the longing and heartbreak of a foolish teenage heart, but He continued ti send prompts and messages of a better relationship on the horizon.
There were kids who came to the dance who seemed to realize their value. You could see them around the edges of the dance. The were recognizable by their dress, their style of dancing and the limited time they spent subjecting themselves to the atmosphere in the ballroom.
Yesterday I told my son I understood why he didn't want to spend $30 for an evening in Babylon. While I feel bad for those girls who don't have a date to the school dances that they long to attend, I recall that I didn't either, and I suspect that I missed very little in the long run.
So after an evening revisiting that borough in Babylon, I am glad to walk away again and not look back.
