Aragon’s Homecoming dance

On Sept. 26, Aragon held its annual Homecoming dance with more than 1,000 students in attendance. This year, the dance featured a New Orleans-inspired theme, “Night at the Bayou.” Many guests said the theme reminded them of “The Princess and the Frog.”

“It was really cool, [though] I don’t see a lot of people doing it,” said freshman Mihir Raghavan. “The theme could have been a bit less niche and more wide.”

The dance was held at a new location: The Alexandria, a corporate meeting space that also acts as an event venue in San Carlos, instead of Devil’s Canyon Brewing Company, which was the venue last year. 

“We chose The Alexandria because it has a beautiful outdoor space,” said Dance Commission Head Anna Dioli. “It has two big rooms so if you are not into dancing you can just go into the other room and [play] games, but it’s all still cohesive.”

The space allowed guests to move freely between the dance floor, the outside area and a room that contained eating areas and games for students to play. A popular activity was taking photos at the photo booth, where a line of students often stretched from one end of the room to the other.

“I loved doing the photos,” said junior Melissa Magness. “I liked that they had that option for those people who didn’t want to dance.”

In late spring, Dance Commission released a form allowing students to vote on the homecoming theme and give suggestions for the dance.

Dance Commission had to make a few last-minute decisions after facing difficulties with the weather.

“We had to  move the photo booth inside as the backgrounds for the pictures were blowing in the wind,” said Leadership Adviser Lindsay Bussey. “Initially we wanted the ‘HOCO’ marquee signs to be outside but they kept falling over. We had to tape all of the outdoor decorations to the tables to keep them in place.”

The event had a wide selection of food available — a mix of entrees, appetizers and drinks, including truffle parmesan fries, pigs in a blanket and mozzarella sticks.

“The food this year was pretty good, overall,” Magness said. “It seemed like a good variety of finger foods. I do wish that there were some more inclusive options for people with food allergies, though, since I know that some of my friends are gluten free, and I don’t recall there being many options for them.”

This year, Dance Commission chose a new DJ for the dance. 

“The DJ was a big highlight for me, since there were some better songs played than usual,” Magness said. “Oftentimes at these dances, there are repeated songs throughout the night, or songs that are not fitting what the students are feeling in the moment, like when the DJ plays a slow song right after a really fast-paced dance song.”

Even so, some students had mixed feelings about the song choices.

“[The DJ should] play more memorable or well-known songs because there were some songs that nobody could sing,” said freshman Sean Ke.

Other students mentioned areas for improvement.

“$50 was a lot for the ticket, and [I] wish the [decorations had] stayed a little more on theme, especially with the price point,” said freshman Mandy Liu. “[While] I understand why they charged us that much, for the price, there are some things that I was a little disappointed in. Overall it was still fun and I did enjoy the dance.” 

The next dance will be Winter Formal on Feb. 6.