Anecdote Theater: The Cha Cha Slide Almost Killed Everyone at My High School Prom
The year was 2004. The location was the Ft. Lauderdale Intracoastal Waterway. The method of conveyance: a boat.
Why a boat? Well, my high school was very small, and I guess the administration figured that renting an entire hotel ballroom for a senior class of 23 students was maybe a bit much. Somehow renting a boat for the night made more sense.
But this boat, it turns out, was still a bit much, so my senior prom was opened to the entire high school. Not just like an underclassman who came as an upperclassman’s date. Every freshman, sophomore, and junior was allowed into our prom, no questions. I’ll be honest, we were all just grateful they didn’t include the middle school kids as well.
It wasn’t a huge boat, but it had two levels. The bottom level was nice and enclosed and had some tables set up with decorations. The top level had a canopy, but was basically exposed to the open air. Here they had set up a DJ and a small dance floor.
Some of you might be getting ahead of me already, and that’s okay, but I was just reminded of a fun tangent.
You see, I’m not the kind of person who sees a dance floor and thinks “that’s not a place that fills me with more anxiety the closer I approach it.” My senior year of high school, I got into this thing of requesting Thriller at every dance I went to, but that’s the closest I ever got to the floor. And I knew this about myself.
I also knew that I wasn’t athletic. So, many months earlier, when the Yearbook students sent a small questionnaire to every senior that contained the question “what is your favorite sport?” I knew that the most correct-adjacent answers of “swimming,” “tennis,” or “basketball” would paint an incomplete picture. I liked all three, in different ways, but claiming that any of them was my “favorite” severely over-stated my feelings for all of them.
And so, having forgotten my answer to this question by the time prom came around, and having not yet had the chance to look over my just-released yearbook, it was with some surprise that I saw a freshman girl come up to me with an excessive level of excitement, and cry “Oh hey! I didn’t know you also did full-contact ballet!”
Ah yes. That’s what I had put down as my favorite sport.
Apparently it was a real thing. A sort of aerobics workout along the lines of Tae Bo. I had no idea!
Anyway, back to the actual story. Given my aversion to the evil square of parquet and sorrow that resided on the top level of the boat, I found myself sitting at a table on the bottom level of the boat when it happened.
The DJ put on the Cha Cha Slide.
“Everybody clap your hands.” It was so unassuming. So innocent. I could hear it through the lower level’s ceiling, could hear my classmates clapping at the recording’s commands, but I could hear every song through the lower level’s ceiling, so it didn’t seem like a big deal.
“To the left. Take it back now, y’all. One hop this time.”
Wait. Did the ceiling just move????
“Turn it out. To the left. Take it back now, y’all. One hop this time.”
Yes. The ceiling definitely just moved. Under the weight of… I don’t know, maybe fifty teenagers? I never got close enough for a decent count, but there were a lot of teenagers up there by my high school’s standards, and their combined forces doing one hop this time, at the same time, was enough to weaken the integrity of the floor beneath them. And with it, the ceiling above me.
It could have ended there. But it didn’t.
“To the right now. To the left. Take it back now, y’all. One hop this time. One hop this time.”
Potentially fifty teenagers doing one hop this time once was enough to vibrate the floor beneath them. Potentially fifty teenagers doing one hop this time twice in succession only magnified the effect.
“Criss-cross! Criss-cross!”
Criss-cross was somehow even worse than one hop this time. I had only just begun to find my bearings again, when suddenly —
“Five hops this time!”
I could hear the material of the ceiling above me straining under the hops. The support pillars were bending. The glass of the windows was vibrating. And the effect followed with its own inertia. Now even your basic “right foot, let’s stomp” was making the entire boat move.
The pilot ran through the lower level, frantic. What the hell was going on? He ran out the back and went up the stairs, and I am not privy to the events that transpired, but the song was somehow allowed to finish. I made my way to the bow, which had only the night sky above it. If the ceiling caved, I would not be beneath it.
In the end, somehow, everything stayed intact. But the Cha Cha Slide almost sank that boat, almost killed all of us. And when it was all over, the pilot made it very clear that the Cha Cha Slide was not to be played ever again.