10 years later...nothing has changed

The year is 1996. I am 16 years old. Songs like "Cotton Eye Joe" and "YMCA" are playing loudly. Large groups of people are doing the electric slide or the macarena. The walls are lined with teens. There is a couple holding hands in the back. The adults are manning the entrance/exit and the refreshment table.

"Sing, Sing, Sing" comes on and there is a cheer, followed by a mad rush to the floor where everyone tries to swing dance. The boys are trying not to drop the girls who are willingly being tossed around by an adolescent male. The song ends and "Everything I do, I do it for You" begins.

Suddenly the girls fall back. The boys scan the crowd of waiting maidens and begin their plan of attack. The braver souls go right into the mass of estrogen and make eye contact. They walk right up to their choice of partner for the song and ask her to dance. They offer their arm. She breathes a sigh of relief, shoots a glance at her friend who is still waiting, takes his arm and goes to the dance floor. Once there, they assume the acceptable ballroom style stance (only they stand practically at arms length) and begin a slow rock, turning in a circle in one spot.

Some of the left over girls will snag the boys that are too shy or too cool to ask someone to dance.

The adults perk up now that slow song has begun. The more suave chaperones will grab their spouse and begin to dance around the floor. They step and spin, weaving through the teen dancers. If a couple is closer than the accepted standard of "a Book of Mormon width" apart, the husband will spin his wife close to the couple where she'll whisper "a little too close, kids" before spinning back.

There's at least one socially awkward young man still trying to find a girl to agree to dance with him. (fortunately for him, "Everything I do, I do it for You" is like 8 minutes long).

The slow dance ends and with the next song a large circle is formed and everyone takes a turn embarrassing themselves by dancing solo inside the circle. Eventually the circle becomes a jostling mass of dancers jumping and flailing around.

Fast forward to 2006. There is a stake youth winter ball and I was asked to attend and take your standard prom style pictures and candids of the kids dancing. I entered to the sounds of "Cotton Eye Joe." I then observed and had flashback after flashback of my own youth. There were the kids that could dance, the kids that pretended like they could dance and the ones that just stayed seated or hovering around the punch table.

There were the chaperones, the cool ones and the not so cool ones. (including my husband who entertained himself by walking around with my baby and thrusting him into the couples who were slow dancing and exclaiming, "this is what happens when you dance too close!!!")

There was the socially awkward boy who followed people around, jumped into people's pictures, got rejected more than once, and spent some time in the corner with a Gameboy Micro.

There was swing dancing, line dancing, circle dancing, mob jumping and slow dancing a "Book of Mormon width" apart. (Although sometimes it was more like a stack of quads width apart.)

And then there was me, observing the whole thing behind the lens of my camera.