A small town in Oklahoma is taking a page from the 1984 movie “Footloose” — by canceling a Valentine’s Day shindig because of an arcane city ordinance enforcing a strict moral code that prohibits dancing in certain cases.

Joni Insabella, owner of the Rosie LaVon’s Marketplace and Event Center in Henryetta, planned the adults-only event for Saturday night, telling the crowd at the local Rotary Club that it could be chance to meet that special someone.

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a sweetheart — maybe you’ll find one,” she said, the Henryetta Free-lance reported.

But she was forced to pull the plug on the dance party because it would have taken place 300 feet from a church — violating an ordinance that forbids boogieing within 500 feet of a place of worship, KTUL-TV reported.

“It just started a terrible firestorm,” she said.

A local resident started the trouble when she took to social media to address the pesky ordinance.

“The ordinance says no dancing allowed. It’s illegal,” sniffed Robbie Kinney, who turned to city officials for guidance, KTUL reported.

“Has this law been overturned? And if so, when?” Kinney said she asked before posting the question on Facebook, where she was soon lambasted.

“They want to attack your character, they want to attack your past,” she said.

Mayor Jennifer Clason said she had always heard about the archaic ordinance.

“It’s never been enforced my entire life. But I’d never looked at it because it never came up,” she said.

Police Chief Steve Norman said Insabella canceled the dance after being accused of getting preferential treatment because her husband is the city attorney.

“We have no intetions of enforcing the ordinance. It was one of those ordinances that was passed long before my time,” Norman told The Post.

“I grew up here and went to school here and we’ve had dances here since I was a kid,” he said. “It’s been basically ignored.”

The chief chuckled about the similarities between the controversy swirling around his city of 6,500 residents and the fictional town on Bomont in “Footloose.”

The cult favorite made actor Kevin Bacon a generational icon in his role as Ren McCormack, a Chicago teen who moves to the town where dancing also is banned.

McCormack turns into a rebel with a cause as he falls for a like-minded teenage girl and fights against the no-dancing law.

In a case of life imitating art imitating life, the movie is based on events that happened in another Oklahoman community, Elmore City.

“A lot of folks in town believed that the movie may have been based on Henryetta, but it’s known that it’s based on Elmore,” Norman told The Post.
“It’s good to get a little notoriety nationally for our little town because it’s like what you think of in Hollywood. It’s a great town to live in, where everyone knows everyone, There’s a church on every corner.”

He said he hopes the ordinance will finally be abolished when the city takes it up at its next meeting Feb.22.

Meanwhile, Insabella is planning for just that – with an Elvis-theme night.

“Elvis is going to really shake it,” she said. “We’re not going to tell them to sit down.”

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