"It sucks!" yelled a boy. The rest of the crowd answered with wiggling tongues, air guitar, and headbanging.

"You know how hard it is to be different," she said. "This is for all those assholes who put you down!" The room morphed into a twisted Southern Baptist convention, hands and lighters waving in the air. Hell's Belles were the perfect band for such a conversion. Part genderfuck and part rock, the band communicates through the universal language of adolescence: heavy metal.

This was the second show sponsored by the Vera Project, a pilot program whose experiment with a city-supported, all-ages music venue will be evaluated at the end of April. Last November, Vera undertook to set up 14 all-ages shows at the Local 46 union building in Belltown. The website aims for the indie crowd (it's orange!), and everyone at this show dressed accordingly, perhaps expecting wall-to-wall black paint and the obligatory piñatas found throughout our city's clubs. Lovers of artifice take note: Local 46 is an actual union building. A plaque in the lobby lists cement masons on the second floor, and the stage sits underneath a giant electrified fist, the logo of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

The motley crowd, teenager and hipster alike, seemed propelled toward identity crisis by this lack of black decor. While my assistant demanded a junior-high display of affection ("C'mon," she kept saying, "sit on my lap"), two high-school-aged girls made out in the lobby, heads bobbing to the beat of the Ramones' "The KKK Took My Baby Away."

In the second set, Majenta of the Razorbabes had a solution for audience self-consciousness: She handed out peanut butter cups and disappeared in a streak of pink fur. The sugar high was delayed until late in the Razorbabes set, well after Majenta teased the audience with taunts such as "The Stranger said you were too stuck-up to dance." Insulting the crowd is a punk rock compliment, but it was lost on stiff-as-a-board 16-year-olds who were finally moved to react. "Shut up and play!" yelled one boy.

But what got the crowd shaking finally were not any onstage taunts or profanity or even a sexual joke about Little Red Riding Hood. The teens seemed too sophisticated, not to mention too sober, for such appeals to their inner party animal. What got them moving, finally, was a cha-cha line that worked its way to the center floor, ending in a jumble that I can only call the World's Most Polite Mosh Pit. Girls, boys, and everyone else bumped and jumped against each other in a movement that was less like a mosh pit than a very confused square dancing ritual. Not to undermine this dancing display--it was great, and I would've joined in if I weren't so stuck-up.

This type of dancing explosion is exactly what Vera Project organizers described in their proposals, many of which were completed for a community and environmental planning degree at the University of Washington. Modeling their plan after a city-run club in the Netherlands, organizers took into account such decadent ideas as what patrons actually want and how to gain and maintain community credibility. Paul Schell take note! As the Vera Project's "Proposal for a Youth-Oriented Concert Series" states, "Our goal is simply to establish a venue for young minds to create activities that evolve around a stage."

With its DIY credibility and mantra of "responsibility and community," the Vera Project has received praise from both teens and more conservative factions. The project even garnered endorsements from The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the very papers whose scare tactics help to keep the ID-card-challenged from seeing shows in the first place. Under the guise of "keeping children safe," one Times editorial ("Council Could Do Better on Dance Ordinance," August 25, 2000) declared that if it weren't for Mayor Schell's veto of the All-Ages Dance Ordinance, "kids as young as 12 could party until dawn." Whenever the possibility of loosening restrictions on clubs seems likely, however, both the Times and P-I cry "Monastery" (a reference to the 1985 church that supposedly fostered an environment of "pederasty" and "prostitution").

One Vera volunteer and former member of the Teen Dance Task Force posits that the project may have passed through the city's budget session because it was labeled as a kind of anti-youth violence program; also, she says, "It wasn't a lot of money; it's considered a pilot project; it's being administered through the Seattle Arts Commission, which gives it a bit more credibility since the SAC is basically a city department."

Holland's Vera club operated with a budget of $60,000... in 1976. Seattle's Vera has $25,000 for everything from equipment to rent, and that money is almost gone. An additional $20,000 contribution from the Seattle Arts Commission will fund the project into the summer, but, says Executive Director James Keblas, "All of these contributions will only get us the very minimum it takes to get started and operational." Shows will be put on hold during May, while Vera is evaluated by the city council, but the project will continue to seek a permanent home.

"We're looking for a big venue, somewhere where you can have hundreds of teenagers and can make a lot of noise," says Art Director Kate Becker. This mission may not be helped by ambitions to schedule several hiphop shows--but Vera also hopes, once finally settled, to offer daily activities for teens, including workshops and art projects.

While youngish patrons have received bad press regarding introversion, I personally find the lack of ass-grabbings and drunken requests for "Free Bird" at Local 46 to be refreshing. When they opened the second show, the Stuck Ups may have felt otherwise. Imagine the horror of playing for high-schoolers while wearing an actual school uniform! Some levels of irony failed to exchange, and technical difficulties left a few teens mumbling toward the lobby. "Stay in school," the band bravely concluded.

A girl next to me wiped sparkly sweat from her forehead and told her friends, "You know what would be good right now? Apple juice, Miller Lite, and iced tea."

The friends agreed, and they all retired to the lobby to discuss which friends they liked and didn't like, and more importantly, why and why not. Next to them, two brothers clung to cell phones with sweaty palms. "Should we call now?" said Younger Brother, which is code for "Can I have a wet willy? Please. Now." Older Brother shushed him and the two blinked rapidly.