Club Paradise: The Eighth Grade Dinner Dance

 It’s getting near to the end of the school year for our kids. It’s time for field trips, plays, performances, graduations, June Faires...and dinner dances. I’ll be busy with these kinds of events for another week or so. So far it’s been a bit of an emotional roller coaster.

My youngest had his 8th-grade dinner dance last Friday night. I’m not sure how these “traditions” get started, but his two older brothers also attended these in their time, six and three years ago, and they had a blast. I have been a volunteer for most of their lives in school, including this year, but haven’t volunteered with the dinner dance before, because of being in school myself and having a younger kid or kids to look after. This year I dipped my toe in. It was now or never.

 It seems that many parents who can’t volunteer at school on a regular basis because of work commitments are able to make a contribution to this festive event. I am one who has had enough of meetings, so I avoided the first few meetings and jumped in a bit later. I went to a meeting that turned out to be about decorations. With my arthritic hands, I am not a good candidate for these tasks. I can handle scissors for only so long. The other choices were “food committee” and “worker bees.” Apparently the food had already been decided, so “worker bee” was it for me. I was also asked to contribute a rice steamer and some strawberries to the effort, so I did that. The theme for this year’s dinner dance was tropical: “Club Paradise.”

I showed up the night before the dance. The doors to the school gym were papered over to keep the surprise from all the kids. Inside, there were cardboard and paper palm trees, potted plants whose pots were being wrapped in green wax paper, and decorations still being cut out. An ornate tropical mural was developing on two walls. Some wooden frames looking like gateways were brought in. There was a huge papier mache mountain getting decorated with saran wrap and fabric which would become a waterfall. I papered some plants, and then cut out some black “shadow grass” to put beneath black shadow palm trees on the mural. I stayed about an hour and a half. I knew my hand would pay if I stayed any longer. I can only imagine how late the others stayed, to finish the mural and arrange everything to look like a tropical garden.

I meant to come back the next day to help some more. But after school, the Dinner Dance Boy was still jacket-less and tie-less and so we went to four, count ’em, FOUR thrift stores and nothing would suffice. Everything was humungous on him. Fortunately we had found a pair of black pants at the Goodwill a week before. There was nothing for it but to borrow a shirt, jacket and tie from Dad (originally discouraged by said individual, for reasons you can imagine). In the meantime, son #1 came home from college for the weekend. Dad was out on a music gig, and son #2, a junior, was also out for the evening. I wasn’t about to leave son #1 in the lurch, so we decided to go out to eat for dinner, and I would show up late at the Dinner Dance.

Dinner Dance Son finally got his outfit together. I will say he looked awesome in his black pants and jacket, white shirt, gold tie, and “Blues Brothers” hat and sunglasses. He got compliments from his brothers and their friends. We drove to school. Over the main entrance was an arrangement of cut paper in a grass hut shape. Two parent doormen in Hawaiian shirts flanked the entryway (one of them is truly Hawaiian). I was impressed. While driving into the parking lot, Dinner Dance Son had observed that two boys walking into “Club Paradise” were not wearing jackets, so obviously it was not cool to wear one, and when we parked, off it came. I whipped out the camera (too late to capture the jacket on film) and snagged a picture of DDS between the cars in the rest of his get-up.

DDS has a gluten-free diet, so I accompanied him with his chosen sauce item into “Club Paradise,” not exactly dressed for this formal occasion. Inside, the office was transformed into a glamorous hallway with the aid of dividers and potted plants, and parent hostesses were taking the names of the “guests” and directing them to their seating in the transformed commons area. Another parent was pressing tissue paper flowers onto the guests. Such guests! The boys were dressed in their more-or-less formal shirts and pants, jackets and ties, and the very glamorous girls in lovely dresses of vivid peacock colors.

Above our heads in the commons was stretched some netting to conceal the institutional lighting, and rented round white tables were decorated with flowers and keepsake menu booklets. Mellow marimba music and African songs by a parent band was the dinner accompaniment. Over in one corner was a Smoothie Shack, where you could get your choice of fruit smoothies, made personally by a parent. DDS slunk into his seat near his friends, and I went to the kitchen to deliver his barbecue sauce. The teriyaki chicken planned for the dinner has soy sauce in it, and most soy sauce contains wheat, which we celiacs must avoid.

I left and went home to go to dinner with son #1. We decided on a local Mexican restaurant, La Fiesta. It’s a blast to go out to dinner with my oldest, because he loves to talk and is majoring in politics at his college, and I never know what he is going to say. We usually have quite animated discussions. This time it was about our nation breaking down and how we all had to get guns. It sounded very survivalistic and my eyes were probably bugging out of my head, listening to him. Wow. Is he seeing into the future? Will there be a civil war? Or has he been reading too many fantasy and science fiction novels? I just didn’t know what to say to all this. But I didn’t have to say much, because pretty soon our food arrived on gigantic aqua-colored plates and we got busy for a while.

We then headed home and I got ready to go back to the dinner dance for the last hour. Fortunately I had found a great sleeveless tropical-print dress at the Goodwill, and had a nice lightweight dressy denim jacket that looked pretty good over it. You may think I’ve been doing a lot of driving, but fortunately this is a small town. We live four minutes from the middle school.

The lights were now dimmed in the Club Paradise dining room, as dinner was over. It had been cooked and served up by parents, and you could visit a dessert table with chocolate fountains into which you could dip fruit; there was pineapple upside-down cake; there were fruit tartlets, and cheesecake with strawberries, also served up by parents. They had made a special crustless cheesecake for DDS, bless their hearts. He was too full to eat it at the time, but was able to take it home.

I wandered about the “Club” visiting with friends and then headed into the “Ballroom.” I entered through a gateway of cutout plywood trees decorated with paper flowers. The kids were clumped together on one side of the gym near the DJ, dancing either with a partner or alone. It was heartening to see this, after previous years of the screaming, running around and jumping up and down that usually goes on at middle school dances. A disco ball twirled light around the ceiling and walls of the Ballroom. The murals and the waterfall were faintly visible. There were garden areas with palm trees and park benches on either side of the DJ and dancers. It was all quite romantic. And before the party ended, the kids called the parents into the ballroom to thank them for the party. Wow! That had to be a first.

These parents were able to create a special evening and memory for their kids, one in which the kids were treated as grownups for the first time, at their own special event. It was the end of an era and the beginning of a new one—high school.  I was glad to have been able to play a small part.

(Next installment: June Faire)