The only thing dirtier than the six couples making out on the red pleather armchairs at Madison Avenue on Wednesday night was what was happening on the dance floor.
""Oh my god,"" my friend Mary said from her perch above the dance floor. ""Yellow-sparkle top is totally having sex out there.""
""Well, judging from the constipated look on the guy's face, it's kind of painful,"" her cousin Meg chimed in. ""I mean, they could at least dirtily grind on the beat of the music. Do you think she thinks she's special?""
""What do you mean?"" I shouted over the thumping bass. I had been late to the apparent dance party and missed out on the previous dance floor observations.
""That guy grinds up on everyone,"" Mary said. I looked. He was concentrating heavily on shaking his hips.
""Before he was dancing with the girl in the pink over there with the bad tan—the one really, really off the beat. And before that with this girl with long blonde hair who kept whipping it in his face. She was probably in high school.""
The dance floor was only half-full, but under the dim lighting and with the pounding dance remixes, it seemed like the place to be. There were the girls who were clearly trying too hard and wearing too little clothing and too much makeup.
There were lots of awkward boys in short-sleeved button-down shirts, khaki shorts and aloof, slightly scared looks on their faces. None of the two groups were intermingling, except for the bold, grinding couples being disgusting in the middle.
I started getting a sense of dAcjA vu. It all seemed so familiar—awkward boys standing outside circles of girls, girls wearing too much eye makeup and too much glitter. A ""Ride the Train"" dance remix. It seemed so, so ... middle school.
Apparently, when you take away the alcohol—as Madison Avenue had done that night—normal-looking, good time-loving college students revert back to their awkward, 13-year-old roots.
My life was appropriately coming full circle.
Middle school, and the dances it provided, caused enough emotional turmoil to span the lifetime of an entire generation. What else is more emotionally scarring than being without a partner for a slow-dance to K-Ci and JoJo's ""All My Life?""
What can damage self-esteem more than getting hit on the head with a volleyball at an eighth-grade mixer, having that volleyball break all 12 butterfly clips that were in your hair arranged in rainbow order and tearfully trying to reapply body glitter in a bathroom?
But it built character, my mom said. ""And you can always buy new butterfly clips."" She always told me middle school and middle school boys were a stupid necessity to get to the far-off, overly alluring high school.
So graduation came and went—complete with a bad Joey McIntyre song—and the eighth-grade class field trip came and went—an ill-fated, four-day jaunt through Washington, D.C.
I never thought I'd return, until I was somehow unfortunately convinced and lured by free pizza into the dirty pit of Mad Ave. I stood at our perch near the make out couches and looked out. How could everyone still be so awkward? How could boys still wear awful, terrible shirts? How could we still be listening to the same music?
I just guess that even as you graduate from college, you can never really graduate from middle school.
Do you have sad stories invovling middle school and K-Ci and JoJo? E-mail Caitlin at cfcieslikmis@wisc.edu.
