Dances With Pirates

This past New Year's Eve, my husband and I served as chaperones during the early shift at an activity for hundreds of youth in our community at the City Rec Center.  As we drove away, we saw carloads of girls chatting excitedly as they pulled into the parking lot.  I wondered whether their experience would match the anticipation they felt and hoped the boys they saw would reach out to them, so they would return home with the level of enthusiasm they had when they arrived.

The activity was a dance and much more:  several ping-pong tables were set up in the lobby and there was a room set up with Wii competitions.  The Wii room was probably the quietest, since nobody could get the volume to work!  My husband and I and the other adult couples assigned to the room laughed that we might outnumber the teens.  I am not a video game fan, but I enjoyed watching the action.

One of the adult couples in our room had hired a sitter for their children, planning to spend the entire evening at the dance.  They had met at a New Years' dance when they were fourteen and were there for sentimental reasons -- so we must assume that dances sometimes turn out well! The presence of hundreds of kids indicated that they had come with hopes of a good time, but the girls (and guys) in our room might have had a more satisfying experience if they'd stayed home with their own video gaming systems.   

For most of the time, only boys occupied our room -- their parents had probably sent them out to socialize, but that's not what happened!  It did not take long for the most experienced players to crush all competition:  the losers left and the winners battled solo, oblivious to the rest of the people at the party -- including those eager girls who had come with hopes of dancing with a real, live Boy.

The most interesting part of the evening happened during the last forty minutes of our shift:  one station was left open and a group of girls wandered in -- and stayed.  They flipped through the games and selected one, then they worked for more than twenty minutes, trying to get the volume to work.  When their efforts did not bear fruit, they decided to play anyway.  They had chosen a dancing game, but there was no music.

From my vantage point in the back of the room, I could see silhouetted bodies moving on the screen as the game idled, waiting for the girls to begin.  The girls lined up, facing a pirate projection on the wall.  When the game started, they all tried following his movements, gyrating and pattering the only audible sounds in the room -- as muted music and vibrations from a real dance across the lobby filtered in.  We left before they finished their first round, and I had noticed something odd:

Girls treasure a chance to dance with boys -- and if no boys will accommodate, even a pirate will do!

Photos from sxc.hu.  Artwork of John Nyberg, ivy smart, louise Docker, Martin Simonis, and the.