LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

dance

At the dance

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Is this everywhere, or just at Lincoln Lutheran? The girls get dressed up for the dance. They buy nice shoes. They wear the shoes to the dance. They get to the dance, go to the bathroom, take off the shoes and dance. (Lauren told me the shoes were all piled up in the girls’ bathroom, and she took a picture as proof.) A few hours later they put the shoes back on and go, one would like to assume, home.

Every dance at Lincoln Lutheran is like this. Well, the High School dances anyway. At the middle school dances the shoes tend to stay on, because the girls might have to beat you in dodgeball after they dance with you.

A few dances ago I wanted to see what it was like, so I took my shoes off too. It was sort of liberating.

On behalf of all the short guys at Lincoln Lutheran, thanks for not wearing some of these.

I could have stood all night….

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I’ve been singing that all day.  (Think ‘My Fair Lady’.)  We chaperoned the dance, and while it was fun standing around, I actually did more sitting than I thought I’d do. (We were only there for two hours.) It was so sweet watching those teenagers run around in their finery.  The part I thought was  hilarious is how all the girls kicked off their shoes as soon as they got there.  Think of the work that went into their outfits – the perfect dress, the perfect hair, the right accessories, and ‘what kind of shoes will I wear that will make this outfit complete?’ – and then everyone is barefoot.

I sat around mostly because I was trying to figure out my new cell phone.  My phone has a seriously broken hinge, so we stopped at US Cellular before the dance and got a replacement.  It’s no iPhone, but it’s pretty cool.  It has a great camera function and a touch screen, but I think I’m taking it back. The camera doesn’t work with my iMac, so what’s the point?

Messy work surface

Formal?

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Um, I guess in Lauren’s absence I’m suppose to post something? I looked through her recent photos and found some that I didn’t know about. The eighth grade girls planned an eighth grade “formal” dance, and asked me to help them with the music. It was all cute and stuff. The girls in their dresses and the guys not in jeans or shorts. We don’t see them so dressed up at the Fun Nights because they all play dodge-ball and other fun things.

When an 8th grade girl tells you it’s formal, you wear a tux.

There were times when all of the girls would rush out of the dance together, and the guys would just stand around looking at each other.

I’ve always wondered what it looked like in there.

They were oddly shy about dancing. Normally they dance together at the Fun Nights, but they were having trouble getting together for the “formal”. Eventually we taught them what a snowball dance was and that worked well. After that we introduced them to Lady’s Choice and Guy’s Choice dances that I remembered from 4-H dances. For those you can ask anyone to dance and they can’t say no. It’s weird that we needed to do that, because I didn’t see anyone say no to anyone all night long, and I was looking for that.

Lauren didn’t get any pictures of it, but it was too cute. Without anything in the way of instruction from us they organized the most embarrassing way possible to accomplish those dances. All of the guys would line up against one wall and the girls against the other and whoever had “choice” would slowly walk across the gym floor and point to the one they wanted to dance with. It was too funny.

Middle School Dance Decorations

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We had our first Middle School Fun Night of the year 2 weeks ago. We stopped having middle school dances at Lincoln Lutheran about 4 or 5 years ago after a poorly supervised dance and a poorly done lock-in. But a few years ago we decided to have “Fun Nights” instead. We have a dance, a dodgeball tournament, a game room, snackbar, face painting and photography studio. We let the seniors run everything and they take any profits after everything is paid for. But that’s not what I wanted to write about.
It's especially groovy for the high kids
We have the best dance decorations and they take about 15 minutes to setup. I bring in one of our iMacs and a couple of video projectors and we project giant 20ft by 30ft images on the gym walls. You get cool shadows when the kids dance in front of them and a nice variety of images: spacescapes, forest scenes, underwater images and abstract “flurries” shifting and dancing around the walls. Cleanup is easy too.