Personally, I think Rodd’s got it cinched with “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” but here goes.
Strictly speaking it wasn’t a prom, it was a middle school “Spring Carnival”. It was arranged by the cheerleading squad who that year (1985 I think) had won some very minor cheerleading competition with a cheer choreographed to Rick Springfield’s “Bop 'Til you Drop”, so they just had to theme the whole school dance around Bop 'Til You Drop, despite the fact that the song was three years out-of-date and not really all that popular to begin with.
Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the lyrics of Bop 'Till You Drop, they go something like:
Bop ‘til you drop
In the hot city
Keep on workin’ day and night
Don’t stop 'til you get what you want
etc…
So the cheerleaders latch onto the “In the hot city” aspect of the song and decorate the whole gymnasium with backlit cardboard cutouts of buildings. To drive home the “hot” aspect they had “flames” made from fringed strips of red cellophane made to ripple via fans blowing air upwards. Very clever really, but let me stress that this wasn’t a very big gymnasium. So between the DJ’s setup, the folded up bleachers, the wrestling mats and the cityscapes, there was maybe four fifths of a basketball court to dance in.
So anyway the dance starts, and after about twenty minutes the boy/girl room polarity is conquered by the siren song of Ah-Ha’s “Take On Me” and some earnest if uncoordinated dancing begins. But on this cramped dance floor it doesn’t take long for somebody to knock down one of the flimsy cityscapes. This keeps happening, and after about four or five times loose piece of cardboard gets stuck into one of the fans powering the cellophane “Fire”.
GNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNRRR!!!
Now, being a bunch of fourteen-year-olds, everybody was absolutely mortified about embarrassing themselves. So nobody was at all willing to dance too near the “city” for fear of making a scene, so the mass of the dancing starts getting concentrated near the opposing wall – where the folded up bleachers were. The bleachers were these big wooden things that folded up like an origami shelf, and they either got jostled or somebody tripped over the locking mechanism or something because they started slowly expanding outward. Now the people standing next to the bleachers are slowly being pressed into the middle of the crowd, but the folks in the middle (including me) don’t realize what’s happening. There’s some muttering, a girl screams, the needle screeches across Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” and then…Pandemonium! The whole dance floor is a tangle of Vans sneakers, Gunny Sax dresses and Members Only jackets.
Eventually peace was restored, and the principal even let the cheerleading squad do their “Bop 'Til You Drop” thing in thanks for their efforts. I couldn’t tell you if it was any good, my friends and I were in the parking lot practicing our breakdancing moves on the cardboard cityscape.