After attending Garfield High School’s 2009 Tolo, it was unclear if I was living in 2009 or 1984. Either way, Garfield’s very own “big brother” has a nasty habit of cutting wrist bands and short-changing its own students.

No ladies were searching for somebody that would take them out and do them right, let alone “make love in the club”, so I decided I would go to Tolo stag. After signing the dance contract as “cool dude” and paying 25 dollars through the use of my friend’s student ID with ASB, I returned home to prepare for a night of merriment. After taking a short nap, shower, and pretending I needed to shave (someday I’ll get real 5 o’clock shadow) I headed out to the EMP fashionably late. But was all of this worth it? Pissed-off senior Carl Majeau doesn’t seem to think so.

“I don’t know why they would think it’s okay to enforce these new rules when they have never needed them in the past,” says Majeau. He was one of the many helpless children dragged into “time out” where he sat out the remainder of the dance.

“I was horribly mistreated,” says Majeau. “They wouldn’t let us stand up or get our belongings that many of us had left upstairs, and we couldn’t talk to anyone outside of the little area.” On top of pulling many students off the dance floor, the administration told the students that they would be talked to about their punishment on Monday morning.

“So they are going to pull us off the dance floor and then out of class? That’s just preposterous,” says Majeau, who agrees with many other students that these punishments were never specified in the contract they had all signed.

Another survivor of the time-out zone, as well as a level 37 dark elf, senior Lucas Chapel sits down with me to talk about his dance experience. “All in all I thought the dance was pretty good; the light show was exceptional!” Lucas exclaims, palms still sweaty from his custom-built desktop computer, “I, too, was sent down into the jail. At least I had the ‘luxury’ of getting a warning, unlike many others in the jail who still had wrist bands.” Like the majority of the students who were shipped off to EMP’s Guantanamo Bay, Lucas felt the dance had good potential but was ruined by the school administrators. This is one jail Barack Obama can’t shut down. (P.S. Lucas is single and on the prowl, and hey, for that matter, so am I).

“I tried to be as fair as possible at the dance,” says Principal Theodore Howard. “Most students can police themselves.”

As the night progressed more and more, people simply vanished behind the iron curtain of the school administration, but this didn’t stop me from getting my groove on the Bass Hunter’s DoTA. In my opinion, a lot of the music was a refreshing break from the usual dance songs, but other tracks were plain weird. “It was so obvious they were trying to prevent us from freaking with the music,” says senior Neil Eddington, who, like me, noticed that as soon as he began getting his funk on with some bombshell (oh heyyy Stephanie Sundsten, we never did finish that dance) the song would immediately change to some mashup of techno and African tribal music. As I circled the mass of sweaty dancing bodies during a techno song, I saw an unusual number of people simply standing around. If we put the scared freshmen aside, what the ring of idle people boils down to is fear of the administration and poor music choice.

Most Garfield students feel that the school administration’s opinion on freak dancing is unfair. In some cases, this view of unfairness is derived from the fact that this is the way our generation dances. To get another view I interview senior Arthur Thomas, a man who knows how to dance in a more traditional manner. “I feel that both grinding and more traditional methods such as Tango are both ways of showing affection towards another person.” says Thomas. “Though traditional dancing may show more ‘class,’ this is the way our generation dances. I’m sure dances that our parents did as children were considered inappropriate at the time.” Arthur feels that freaking should not be frowned upon and is a perfectly acceptable way of dancing.

“When they played the Cha-Cha Slide, all I could think is ‘we’re not in middle school anymore,’” says sophomore Roxi Ko — I, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed the intimacy and sexual tension between me and my dance partner Zoe Brown to that very same song (let’s have babies please). Everyone has a different taste in music. The best thing you can do is try to enjoy yourself.

“The truth is, you have fun when you want to,” explains ASG President Zawdie Stephens-Terry. This is one of the most legitimate things I have ever heard. Admittedly it is rather hard to have fun with an administrator breathing down your neck.

“To be honest, if I had grown up in your generation I would be doing it,” says Howard on the topic of freak dancing. “It’s how you grew up.”

I asked Mr. Howard why the school had so suddenly changed its dance policy; the head honcho had this to say: “Garfield was the only school in the district that wasn’t in district compliance,” explains Mr. Howard. “After four years of negotiating with the district and trying to find other solutions to what it saw was a problem, we were forced to make serious changes to dance policy.”

“I’m in a difficult position here. The district has gotten over a thousand complaints from parents about the things that go on at dances. I had no other choice but to bring Garfield into compliance with district policy. On the other hand, many of my students are very upset about the new policy changes. I’m between a rock and a hard place,” says Mr. Howard, who is trying his best to be in favor of his students and the district.

The future of Garfield dancing is unclear. “We are hoping for significant policy changes before Purple and White,” says Stephens-Terry.

But whether we are controlled like a dystopian society or allowed to answer the call of our burning loins, let’s make the best of it, Garfield.