Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot (and smelly and stiff) like me?

By Diana Samuels

There’s a distinctive and not really very pleasant smell in the Louis Room, something like B.O. and orange juice. The windows are open, and the colored lights seem strange in the daylight. The tables of food in the back of the room are littered with almost-empty Gatorade bottles.

The dancing has become shuffling, swaying from foot to foot along with the beat.

“Are we still alive y’all?” one of the emcees calls out.

They slide to the left and stomp their right feet along with the lyrics of “Cha Cha Slide,” but their cha chas are definitely stiff and when they go all the way to the floor it’s not exactly graceful. But the dancers still shout enthusiastically to Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know,” pretending to get in each other’s faces as they yell about their boyfriend’s new lover or whatever Alanis is complaining about.

During a break between songs, the projection screen shows a short movie starring the emcees as twins separated at an early age, when they were six-foot-tall babies in makeshift diapers. They reunite later in slow motion, running towards each other and embracing as a melodramatic soundtrack plays. Someone in the audience starts clapping slowly, like something out of “Not Another Teen Movie,” and everyone cheers for a minute before the music starts playing again.