Hot Date at the Stake Dance

With my calling comes the sweet opportunity to chaperon our stake's youth dances twice a year.  Steve and I along with seven other couples from the stake got to spend last Saturday night seeing and smelling teenage angst for three sweaty hours.  It was awesome...

as you can tell by this picture...

and this picture.

Ok, really...it was fun.  And these pictures were during one of the sparse down times when freshly washed, combed, curled, and cologned teenagers weren't nervously sauntering through the front doors in large droves.

But they only smelled sweet and clean for a moment.  Get those bodies on the dance floor and its just a matter of minutes before the smell of a Macy's perfume counter and failed deodorant mingle into a  fermenting combination that still burns my nose as it did way back when I was a youth.  It's the exact same I tell you, and it is a scent ingrained in my brain.  I could pick it out of a million.

Steve and I manned the front doors checking dance cards for signatures for the first half of the dance where I learned teenage boys think I'm susceptible to their smoldering looks and smiles.  Many of them tried to cover the expired dates on their cards.  I can read boys, I'm not three.  Also, I'm not fifteen anymore and just waiting for an older boy to flash his baby blues at me.  I'm impermeable to your mind tricks of getting into a stake dance without an interview.  Silly Jedi, those tricks only work on the young and desperate.

The second half of the evening Steve and I were floaters and spent our time wandering around the church house looking for hormonal couples yearning to find the perfect secluded make out spot.   We have to check the chapel, the classrooms, the parking lot, and yes...I can't believe I'm writing this...the baptismal font.  Have these kids no shame????

Don't they know the place to make out in Twin Falls is under the Perrine Bridge and...gulp...the drive-in?  (cough cough...I'm guilty of both.)

Luckily, there were no guilty kissy face parties at this dance.  We had all the forbidden places roped off and guarded by chaperons.   That, or maybe all the naughty kids do know about the bridge and the drive-in. 

 However, that didn't stop my husband from wanting me to make out with him in one of the upstairs classrooms.  I put a stop to that!  I'm much classier now than I was in my youth.  Poor Steve, he missed out dating me when I was slightly reckless and into "good clean fun." (That and he was already in his 20's when I went through that phase...Um, I was jail bait.)

Besides torturing my husband while walking around the building, my favorite part of the evening was watching the kids act as kids do and recognizing which girl at the dance was I most like when I was fifteen.  I pointed a group of girls out to Steve and told him I would have been with those girls.  They weren't dancing but huddled together close to the walls with wandering eyes just hoping, praying and wishing a cute boy would ask them to dance, all the while begging that the creepy slightly unfortunate guy wouldn't.  

"I kept the walls from caving in at stake dances.  I did a good job, not one ceiling came crashing down when I was there."

I asked Steve which kid he was.  He pointed out the boy that was wildly swinging his dance partner around the room.  I wasn't sure if he was dipping her, or giving her whiplash.

"I was obnoxious" Steve stated, "I was that kid."

"What!?"  I exclaimed, "...I married THAT kid?"

For shame.  I married THAT kid.