Musings on the Demise of the High School dance….

Even though I’ve rarely ever danced in my life, going to dances was a really big part of my young life. A bunch of us were just discussing the dances of old on Facebook and we have very fond memories of those social engagements. You never really hear a word about dances these days and I think they’ve mostly died out. And I know for a fact that there are no more high school dances for sure….got talking to a teacher about this recently and I guess there’s too much drinking and fighting and there’s a big liability issue. Also, this person told me, most teachers don’t really want to spend an evening trying to police a bunch of young people intent on partying. In fact, if you wanted to hold a school dance these days, I guess you’ve actually got to hire a couple of off-duty police officers at fairly huge expense to “police” the thing.

And it really must be the liability thing because there was considerable drinking and fighting at dances in the old days too. In fact, on some nights, you thought you’d gone to a fight and you were hoping a dance might break out at some point. And I don’t know, but that people didn’t seem to worry too much about it….there wasn’t much drinking and fighting in the actual dance and most of that activity took place outside…but the kids just kind of sorted it out by themselves and the teachers, or whoever was supervising, seemed to be able to manage.

I can well remember one of my early bands, Strange Brew, and we put on a few of our own dances. We’d rent a hall in one of the smaller villages around Hanover, maybe Neustadt or Ayton, and we’d hold a dance….we’d put in a stock of pop and potato chips, tack up a few posters and we were in business. But we always had to talk our parents, or some other adults, into chaperoning the event because you just had to do that in those days. And I know for a fact there was lots of drinking and a bit of fighting at all these types of things. But somehow we handled it….

Dances were just a really big part of high school….we had some of the best bands in Canada come through Hanover High back in the old days….Guess Who, Lighthouse, Mashmakan, Crowbar, McKenna/Mendleson Mainline……great bands….and I must admit that sometime in the late 1960’s most of these “dances” were replaced with more concert-type events where there wasn’t much dancing, but everybody sat on the floor and watched the band. And there may have been a few recreational substances floating around over the course of the night.

Anyway, the demise of dances has been, I think, a great loss for the younger generations. In fact, these days I’m not sure where boys and girls or people in general “hook-up” or sort of learn to socialize. And I must admit that, for me, dances were a pretty huge source of stress. I had huge difficulty asking girls to dance, always figuring that it put them in a somewhat difficult spot and knowing it put me there for sure. But I was probably overly sensitive to this type of thing, because I am to most things in life. I found a lot of stuff pretty stressful when I was a teen, but it sort of made me who I am – and I’m good with that.

I know lots of people still dance at bars and places like that, but there’s really nowhere for young people. And this brings me back to a familiar theme – which is that kids today have pretty well nothing to do but hook themselves up to their devices and disappear from Planet Earth. And that’s kind of a sad reality for sure. I’ve always been a bit of a social misfit and have always sort of not fit into the normal scheme of things, so growing up was pretty tough sledding for me most of the time. But I’m glad I went through all of it because, quite frankly, life is pretty tough sledding most of the time….and that’s a thought that should get no argument – from any sane person….