September 16, 2009--It's A Snap

When the hormones are flowing, you have to keep an eye on those kids. Thirty years ago it was pull-tops from beer cans and then with Madonna throwing her hips around it was color-coded plastic bracelets. If you can get your hands on the Like A Virgin video, check out what she’s wearing on her wrists. That vixen!

But thanks to the principal of Angevine Middle School in Lafayette, Colorado, near Boulder (of course), though these “jelly” bracelets have reappeared among teenagers, he has taken the courageous step to ban them and thus out there all is again right with the world.

For the uninitiated, which very much included me until the other day, it is claimed that we’re talking about more than a retro fashion statement. Depending on the color of the bracelets, they are supposed to play an essential role in a sex conspiracy among the young and previously virginal.

Here’s how they say it works and why we have to be thankful to Angevine principal Mike Medina:

Back in the 1980s, girls carrying around an intact pull-tab were signaling to the boys that they were available to be kissed and perhaps fondled. Those bolder teenagers toting broken tabs were willing to go all the way. Clever those kids—they had learned from their English teachers the differences between similes and symbols and metaphors. Broken tabs. Get it?

But this had it limits—it was a nothing or all situation. What about gradations between a little kissing and hugging and getting laid? That’s when the plastic bracelets came into play. With them kids could signal a fuller range of things they were willing to do. So yellow indicated hugging was allowed; purple, kissing; red, lap dancing (again, those kids); blue, oral sex; and then there was black.

And though they faded out at about the time Madonna went on her Blond AmbitionTour, in these conservative times, as with so much else, they’re back. Including in places like Lafayette. Perhaps especially in places such as that where there’s not that much to do to keep kids interested in school or anything else. Except, of course, fooling around.

Leave it to the Paper of Record, the New York Times, to be on top of the story and provide all the news fit to print. You can see their report about this right here, linked below.

The 15 year-old girls hang out in the school cafeteria or loll around on the grass in nice weather while the pimply guys bop around checking out the bracelets. Assuming, unlike me who is totally color blind, they spot red and, if a lap dance would do it for them (to me unfortunately it would look like purple), they snap off the wristband and hang on to it until later when, presumably in private, it serves as what cultural anthropologists would call a “sex coupon.” Thus this teenage ritual is called “snapping” and the retained coupon can be cashed in for the kiss or the lap dance or . . .

Back in my day yellow would have denoted hand-holding; blue, permission to put an arm around a girl’s waist; and red, if you got real lucky, would allow a goodnight peck on the cheek after going to the movies. Of course, my PS 244 tyrant of a principal, Dr. Siefert (he had no first name and wasn’t really a “doctor”), would have been all over that situation. Just as he made sure the closet was always locked where backboard erasers were vacuumed because if Heshy Perlmutter could manage to inveigle Carol Siegelstein into it, who knows what might have transpired.