First campus dance considered successExcuse me? Excuse me? You can dance at ACU now? Where was this liberal Board of Trustees when I was in school? Oh, yeah. They were in school with me. Or in school after me.
ACU’s first on-campus dance had students swaying to the music Tuesday night in the Bob and Shirley Hunter Welcome Center. “Dance in Disguise” was the first implementation of recent changes in the university’s dance policy.
Tom Craig, director of student productions, was thrilled about the first official dance on campus. Craig said they hoped to create an atmosphere celebrating who we are as Christians through this event and new opportunity.
“It’s exciting because we’re kind of breaking new ground,” Craig said. “We’d never had this opportunity in a formal setting before.”
ACU’s Board of Trustees recently approved a new dance policy, allowing campus organizations to request that student’s be allowed to dance at social events.
You have to have some kind of understanding just how conservative ACU, and the churches that supported the school, were in those days. Succinctly put, dancing was a sin. Based on what I see on television today, it still is. Back then, people spoke out in the strongest terms about dancing. Sermons were preached about dancing, speakers at youth programs assailed it as the Devil's highway, and it was even against the law in nearby Anson, Texas (the town that may have been the inspiration for the movie Footloose.) Why?
Dancing leads to sex.
Well, yeah. And so does parking out on on country roads, and if the Cialis commercials are to be believed, so do smiles and gentle touches, and sudden rainstorms and any number of other things. Plus, might I suggest that couples that skip the dance and head straight to the parking spots have significantly longer to get in trouble than those who come straggling in later, but that's another story.
We had dances in my hometown; official school-sponsored dances, and at teen canteen every Friday night (except during football season), and often at private parties. I want to go on record as saying I attended many of those activities, but I never danced. I guess that's the terpsichorean equivalent of not inhaling. Simply put, I could never master the process. I didn’t have two left feet, I had no feet when it came to dancing. Dancing was the recipe for making me more awkward than I already was, not the recipe for … you know.
Since there were no school sponsored dances at ACU, and participating in a dance (or more accurately getting caught participating at a dance) was grounds for dismissal from school - even the boot-scootin' kind - that activity sort of disappeared from the radar, except for my disk-jockey days. I have previously mentioned the evening that I was broadcasting from a sock hop at the Dyess AFB Youth Center, and there was a live band there as well as the records I was playing. You may recall that at one point I thought it was a good idea to interview the members of the band and they all identified themselves as John Smith. Imagine the odds - five guys in a band all named John Smith! Of course, all of them were enrolled at ACU (one was an instructor) and certainly didn't want their participation in a dance made public. I on the other hand, was using my real name!
So, since I couldn't actually dance, what did I do at these activities? Like many of my classmates, I was one of the guys standing around the perimeter, trying to look like Joe Cool. And I submit to you that nothing has changed in 50 plus years. Take a look at this picture from the pages of the Optimist (yes, I see that it's a copyrighted picture. If they give me any grief I won't send my annual donation to the school).
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