My Awesome Homecoming Dance

Let me get this out of the way first - the homecoming dance was AWESOME.

My date and I went with a group of five other students - two pairs of dates and one "unaffiliated" student. We met up at somebody's house and posed for an obnoxious quantity of pictures while our parents snapped away. Then the seven of us drove into dinner and sang along with my date's iPod all the way up, making tacky dancing-esque arm gestures to the rhythm.

We ate dinner at Jacobi's in Walla Walla. While we waited for our order to ar- rive, my date and I played tic-tac-toe with a grid made of utensils and sugar packets for markers as our dining companions critiqued our strategies. Dinner conversa- tion topics ranged from the homecoming competitions to hyperbolistic loathing of rival Knowledge Bowl teams to what colleges ev- eryone wanted to go to.

When this last topic was broached and it was my turn to share, I attempted to back out, saying "It's embar- rassing. You don't want to know."

"Is it (deleted name of local college)?" asked my friend Hannah. "No, not quite so close to home," I said, immediately slapping myself for giving away identifying informa- tion.

"(Deleted name of notso local college)? (Deleted name of second not-so-local college)?" asked another girl.

I shook my head

"(Deleted name of the bitter rivals of my dream college)?" guessed my date. "(Deleted name of my dream college)?"

I shot him my best attempt at the evil eye.

"(Deleted name of my dream college)," droned the group in unison.

I slapped myself a second time.

Afterwards, we all stopped at the candy dispensers near the exit and bought twenty-five cents worth of jelly beans. Then we drove downtown and stopped at Starbucks just because we could.

All of us had glitter-aug- mented corsages or boutonnières on, and by the time we arrived at the dance we were all thoroughly sparkly, from our faces to the fronts of our formalwear to our nylons/slacks.

The dance itself was also sheer awesomeness. Having come with a group, I felt obligated to dance in the cluster they formed. It was much more restrictive than the free-range hip-hop/jazz/ kung fu/ballet/pop/yoga moves I usually pull, but after a while I got the hang of it and started enjoying myself.

One thing about high school dances that they don't really show on TV - the music is LOUD. Well, of course, everyone expects the fast-paced pop music to be ear-blasting, but even the slow, crooning coun- try songs that we "slow- danced" to were unbeliev- ably loud. In the movies, when these songs start playing and the students pair off, the main character is always easily able to murmur sweet nothings to the leading lady. Not so much with the two of us:

Me: "THANKS FOR TAKING ME!!!"

Him: " WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT PAYING FOR GRAVY?"