Get Your Freak Off

Hear hear, LA Times! I wasn't crazy about middle- and high-school dance moves, just because pubescent gyrating and R. Kelly's lyrical euphemisms seemed creepy. (Correction: seem creepy.) Apparently the parental inhibitions about and actions against the dance moves that made me avoid the Prom dance floor (at least until "Hey Ya!" came on) are taking shape around the county. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, officials apparently fret over...

..how to deal with freaking, grinding and other provocative dances.

Their solution: Fight explicit teen dancing with an equal dose of explicitness. Downey and Aliso Niguel are among the first schools to draft "dance contracts," binding agreements that parents and students must sign before a teenager can step onto the dance floor.

Pro-censorship I am not, but I think this is just a remarkable study in cultural dances and the ways they're shaped! Parents have a say in kids' permissions? Well, then parents have a say in kids' dances. And if they're anything like the parents sitting around in my family tree, they're making that say loud and clear at wedding receptions. Just wait 'til "Tricky" plays.

Surely we can't, and shouldn't, always attack the root of a problem. (That is to say, here, the Axe commercials and superstar-straddling music videos that make this stuff seem glamorous, not disturbing.) An impressionable mind, that is to say one under the age of 25 or so, can get pushed around! That's growing up!

But hey, if you're a middle school teacher in need of a solution for a dance problem, follow suit:

Some schools are forgoing contracts in favor of less formal methods. The private Pacific Hills School in West Hollywood will hold a Halloween dance Oct. 30 and if couples are caught gyrating, lights will be turned up or the music changed to Burt Bacharach or William Shatner singing "Mr. Tambourine Man," said Mickey Blaine, the dean of students.