When I was in middle school, the big thing to do on the weekends if you were a “cool kid” was to attend the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) dances at one of my town’s four parishes.
That parish was Saint Jude’s.

I went to public school like many other attendees from both in and out of town did, but anyone who paid the five dollar entry fee was allowed into the dance. The parish made a killing off of those dances and off of all of the hormonally-charged pre-teen shenanigans that went down within those holy, hallowed walls of Saint Jude’s deteriorating gym. The gym was so bad that even after they ripped out the soggy and cracked wooden floors, the tiled court that they put in was so shitty that you could pull up some of the tiles with your finger. Whenever I played basketball in that God-forsaken gym I had to pray to God that I wouldn’t slip on a tile shifting below my feet or step on a piece of gum or a speck of some junior high-schooler’s bodily fluid from the dance the night before.

The place was skeevy as all hell but it was all we had in those days so no one cried too much about it.
Whether there was rain, sleet, snow, or toxic sludge pounding down on us from the heavens, we would – without question – show up for those dances every Friday night during the school year. Every single bit of youthful degeneracy and infantile indiscretion could be found at Saint Jude’s on Friday nights. Friday nights at Saint Jude’s – affectionately dubbed “The Whorehouse on the Hill” by the kids – could make a coke-fueled night at Studio 54 back in the 70s look like Tuesday night bingo at the retirement community just down the road from the parish. There was simply nothing that the chaperones – all moms from the parish – could do to stop the spaghetti strapped girls from performing some sort of bizarre, hip-hop-infused mating ritual with the boys who all were convinced that if they just wore more Quicksilver and Billabong t-shirts from PacSun to go with their rope and pukka shell necklaces, they would eventually fend off all of the competition from the other dance-goers and land themselves the coveted job of “Apparel Model” at our local mall’s PacSun store.
I may or may not be joking about that.

If you managed to grind it out with Casey or Kelly to the booming sounds of Usher or Lil Jon on any given Friday night, you would be The Man for the rest of the upcoming week. If you managed to then get with Casey, Kelly, or both fine young ladies at the dance in one of the bathrooms or away from the prying eyes of one of the more puritanical parish parents chaperoning then you would henceforth shed your title as “The Man” and ascend to The Throne of Flyness as “The Lord of the Dance,” conqueror of all Caseys, Kellys, and Courtneys.
Years after those wild middle school nights at Saint Jude’s were gone, some knob jockey decided to complain to the school about the dances and how there was so much awful and degenerate behavior going on. Somehow they got our local paper and then our city’s magazine to write about the infamous dances and once the word got out around our county and some calls were made to the holy head honchos who ran the school and the parish, the dances were shuttered forever.

Word got around to us dance alumni who had long moved onto college and beyond about the dances being shut down and we all reminisced with each other about just how crazy, fun, and critical they had been to us and for our development as teenagers and kids growing up. Not long after the dances were shuttered, dwindling enrollment and financial troubles within the archdiocese and the church meant that Saint Jude’s had to close their catholic school and all hope that those dances might be revived for a new generation of kids from our town and all over the county was gone for good.
The last middle school dance that I attended was my eighth grade recognition dance at the end of the year. It was a dance that you had to sort of get dressed up for and the boys wore collared shirts with khaki shorts and the girls wore dresses. This dance was a lot different from the dances at Saint Jude’s because this was more of a formal dance and there wasn’t much of any grinding or “dirty dancing” going on that I can remember; it was mostly guys and girls dancing in the slow dance way that you do at prom in high school. This meant, of course, that at least two-thirds of the kids stood around awkwardly and didn’t interact with the opposite sex while the remaining third-or-so had either the looks or the bravery to approach one another and have a better time than everyone who watched from the sidelines. Everyone spent most of the time just huddling around in their own little cliques and circles and trying to entertain themselves or trying to find a way to get the attention of some guy or girl that they wanted to dance with before the night was through. It was all very juvenile and funny looking back on it now and it feels bittersweet in a way since none of us can ever get back to that place again in our school’s cafeteria-come-dance hall and since – for me personally – that year may have been the best and most memorable year of my childhood.

At the end of the dance I had to use the bathroom and when I was done I got this feeling and just had this urge to walk through the school one last time before leaving it behind. I walked around past classrooms I had sat in and through the gym and locker room and art and music rooms as well but I couldn’t get to the wing of the school where I had my favorite class with my favorite teacher; these metal gates were put up to keep kids out of certain parts of the school each day after everyone went home and the gates were set up on this day to keep people from walking through there during the dance. When I went back to the cafeteria the dance was over and nearly every person had left and had filtered out of the place. There was a song playing and it was the first time that I had heard it and it instantly got to me and made me stand in the empty cafeteria and listen to it the whole way through while some chaperones and parents were cleaning up. The song was [Wish You Were Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjpF8ukSrvk).