Footloose celebrated its 40th Anniversary last year with a big hullabaloo at its main filming location—Payson High School. So it’s common local knowledge it was shot right here in Utah— Utah County, to be precise. But the film’s script sets the “Overly Religious Town where Dance is Forbidden” somewhere in the Midwest. The scenery? Utah. Tractors for the chicken fight? Utah. The roller mills? Utah. The way Kevin Bacon asks the preacher’s daughter to dance?
Not Utah.
A careful eye will note that Bacon’s Ren McCormack simply asks Lori Singer’s Ariel Moore if she’d like to go to the dance. There are no scavenger hunts, piles of M&Ms, fortune cookies or candy hearts to sort through, nor an elaborate balloon-popping ritual on either side of this teenaged rite of passage.
Here, as in the Midwest, high school is punctuated with the requisite occasions for dance and merriment, both formal and informal. But in Utah, the question-popping portion of these rituals has become high art. It is not enough for a young boy to see a young girl across a crowded cafeteria, make the long walk toward her and merely mutter, “Will you go to the dance with me?”
There are rules, formalities to be observed. First, the boy must surprise the “heck” out of her by pasting hundreds of meticulously cut-out paper polka dots onto her parents’ home. (Mc- Bride, David, The Polka-dot Maneuver, 1988.) Next, a poorly metered limerick indicating that the young lady has indeed been asked to the dance (and is not the victim of very strange, perhaps deviant, vandalism) is taped to the front door.
It reads: Your house is like a clown’s pants/it would like to go to the dance/on one dot you’ll find my name by chance/and then you can tell me if you want to be like the clown’s pants (and go to the dance) (McBride, 1988).
At this point, the girl and her squealing sisters, friends and/or fellow Madrigals will collect every single dot (many of which are on the roof) and hunt for the young man’s name. For the reply, a helium tank is procured and thousands of balloons are crammed into the young master’s bedroom. (McMurray, Janean, The Balloon Caper, 1988.) Inside one of these balloons is a scrap of paper with the word “yes” written on it.
They will not speak to each other until the actual night of the dance, as is tradition.
From the above study, it’s clear that Utah youth are preoccupied with avoiding the humiliating potential of the question (known as the “walk of shame” in less-advanced teenaged societies). The awkwardness of the moment is completely avoided by elaborate (at times, borderline illegal) overtures designed seemingly to shame the askee into answering in the affirmative.
As in: “Well, he went to all this trouble. I might as well go with him” (McMurray, 1988).
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