Nov 10
22
Perverted government school dances
National Post – Nov. 20, 2010
‘Grandma’s watching’
By Joe O’Connor
Jeana Wilson is only 17. She was not even born when the movie Footloose came out. But she is familiar with the plot: A big-city boy, played by Kevin Bacon, moves to a small town in the American West where rock-and-roll and dancing are illegal, and a good-times-quashing, Bible-thumping preacher, played by John Lithgow, keeps the teenagers in check. “Footloose is a good comparison to what’s going on around here,” says Ms. Wilson, the student council co-president at Glace Bay High School in Glace Bay, N.S. “Half of the adults know what happens at dances and they accept it and half the adults are old school and they don’t accept it all.”
Peter Campbell is a principal, not a preacher, and while he may not be “old school” he did ban dances at Glace Bay high after a night of student bacchanal in the school gymnasium, and on the streets beyond. The problem was not rock and roll. It was underage drinking. And fighting. And a pulsing dance beat and an epidemic of “grinding” – of girls in micromini-mini-skirts and boys dancing right behind them in a sexually suggestive manner – in a mash of pelvic bumping and thrusting that transformed the high school dance floor into a raging ocean of teenage lust. The display shocked even the most battle-hardened of dance chaperones. “It was our first dance of the year,” Mr. Campbell says. “Everyone was forewarned about behaviour from the previous year, about inappropriate dressing, underage drinking and dancing that is inappropriate in nature. “We had some issues at the dance and we reached a point where we were not going to put up with it anymore.”