When I was in middle school, the big thing to do on the weekends if you were a “cool kid” was to attend the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) dances at one of my town’s four parishes.

That parish was Saint Jude’s.

I went to public school like many other attendees from both in and out of town did, but anyone who paid the five dollar entry fee was allowed into the dance. The parish made a killing off of those dances and off of all of the hormonally-charged pre-teen shenanigans that went down within those holy, hallowed walls of Saint Jude’s deteriorating gym. The gym was so bad that even after they ripped out the soggy and cracked wooden floors, the tiled court that they put in was so shitty that you could pull up some of the tiles with your finger. Whenever I played basketball in that God-forsaken gym I had to pray to God that I wouldn’t slip on a tile shifting below my feet or step on a piece of gum or a speck of some junior high-schooler’s bodily fluid from the dance the night before.

The place was skeevy as all hell but it was all we had in those days so no one cried too much about it.

Whether there was rain, sleet, snow, or toxic sludge pounding down on us from the heavens, we would – without question – show up for those dances every Friday night during the school year. Every single bit of youthful degeneracy and infantile indiscretion could be found at Saint Jude’s on Friday nights. Friday nights at Saint Jude’s – affectionately dubbed “The Whorehouse on the Hill” by the kids – could make a coke-fueled night at Studio 54 back in the 70s look like Tuesday night bingo at the retirement community just down the road from the parish. There was simply nothing that the chaperones – all moms from the parish – could do to stop the spaghetti strapped girls from performing some sort of bizarre, hip-hop-infused mating ritual with the boys who all were convinced that if they just wore more Quicksilver and Billabong t-shirts from PacSun to go with their rope and pukka shell necklaces, they would eventually fend off all of the competition from the other dance-goers and land themselves the coveted job of “Apparel Model” at our local mall’s PacSun store.

I may or may not be joking about that.

If you managed to grind it out with Casey or Kelly to the booming sounds of Usher or Lil Jon on any given Friday night, you would be The Man for the rest of the upcoming week. If you managed to then get with Casey, Kelly, or both fine young ladies at the dance in one of the bathrooms or away from the prying eyes of one of the more puritanical parish parents chaperoning then you would henceforth shed your title as “The Man” and ascend to The Throne of Flyness as “The Lord of the Dance,” conqueror of all Caseys, Kellys, and Courtneys.

Years after those wild middle school nights at Saint Jude’s were gone, some knob jockey decided to complain to the school about the dances and how there was so much awful and degenerate behavior going on. Somehow they got our local paper and then our city’s magazine to write about the infamous dances and once the word got out around our county and some calls were made to the holy head honchos who ran the school and the parish, the dances were shuttered forever.

Word got around to us dance alumni who had long moved onto college and beyond about the dances being shut down and we all reminisced with each other about just how crazy, fun, and critical they had been to us and for our development as teenagers and kids growing up. Not long after the dances were shuttered, dwindling enrollment and financial troubles within the archdiocese and the church meant that Saint Jude’s had to close their catholic school and all hope that those dances might be revived for a new generation of kids from our town and all over the county was gone for good.

I’ve been to bat mitzvahs, house parties, high school dances, bachelor parties, and weddings since middle school, and ’til this very day nothing has compared to those nights at Saint Jude’s with my childhood friends. I’m not sure anything ever will.