Dance parties are something strange. There is a primal instinct in all of us to move our bodies to obnoxious rhythms. It helps us relieve stress, have fun, and show off to the opposite sex. Well at this time of the year being Valentine’s Day, there seems to be a lot of those, especially for the singles out there in the United States. I figure dances always occur during this time to help singles out there find their valentine so we do not feel so lonely on this day of days.
This Valentine’s Day weekend I attended two of them myself, either because I just like to dance, socialize and glamorize in all of the attention I can get at them or because I was really bored and wanted something to do. Either way, I had fun!
The first dance I went two actually was at my youngest brother’s school, it happens to be a chartered school and the group who organized it rented it out, one big coincidence. Well thanks to the impersonal event system on Facebook I was invited to the party where my friend was DJing. I arrived there thinking I would run in to at least a few friends since they tend to know the same DJ and are invited to all the same events. Wouldn’t you know it, I did not know anyone there except the DJ. Well, rather than scouring away like a normal person I decided to take this opportunity to meet a lot of new people that I probably would never see again. I had a good time dancing the “All the Single Ladies”, Lady Gaga, the Top 40, and all the other dances. This dance had a lot of people from the same ward there although about 500 people were invited on Facebook, all of them clicking “Maybe” as their status for maybe being at the dance so not to hurt their inviters feelings although I pretty sure the inviters weren’t there either. This ward was about the only group there and so everyone asked me, “Who are you here with?” “Why, I am here just too party friend!” I would respond “I hear that!” They would say back, then I would talk to them for maybe two minutes and then move on to the next person where the same situation would go down. Good times, guaranteed that is the last time I show up at a random dance party without some other friend there I can sucker in going with me.
The next dance party I went to was a lot less awkward, it was put on by my local church congregation and we invited about nine other ward (congregations) over as well. To be honest, Utah Mormon dance parties are lame when it comes to turnout. There was maybe over 900 people invited to this dance and maybe 100 showed up, but that did not stop the people there to have fun! This was a Valentine’s Day dance and there was a lot of great food provided by the Marvellous Catering Company (I recommend them for any wedding, party, corporate event, spoiled sweet-16 party, etc). Several people just busted out the moves, it was a blast. Really, these kind of dance parties are fun. People just go out there and have fun and they do not care if they dance or not. A lot of people need to have that kind of attitude, maybe they cannot dance, but really, what white person can? (the king of pop technically does not count!) and they need to go out there and just have fun! That is how this dance party was and it was great. In the end I got to dance with a few cute girls and realize that the conversation was boring during the dance, so they therefore lost my interest. Seriously, these dance parties between singles ward are made just to find people to date, and I found a cool girl who caught my interest and I got her number. Thinking I was all cool about it, I decided to advertise this to a friend, only to discover he had four numbers from the dance. . . someone is a number hog.
Basically dance parties are fun, when you are not by yourself at a party where you are expecting someone to be there that you know. So just go out there and dance, meet new people, party on, and go crazy. It makes life fun! We all every once in a while need to just flow with the groove and have some fun, dancing will let you do that.
