What About Prom?

This may come as something of a surprise to you, but I did not go to my senior prom in 1993. I didn’t go to my junior prom in 1992, either. In fact I am compelled to admit that I went to exactly no proms while I was in high school, and that for a while there it was kind of a difficult issue.

I was a sort of middle-of-the-road weird kid in high school. Not too super weird in the grand scheme of life, in the having-no-friends sense, but weird-ish enough for my tiny, very wealthy, very preppy school. I wanted nothing more than to get the perfect untucked look on my polo shirt and to have my hair part on the side, but I wore long skirts with Chuck high tops to school and went to my friend’s band concerts and carried a poetry journal instead. I was in the Renaissance fair for a couple of years and in the drama club, and I was also a Teen Evangelist so I hung out at church a lot and at one point was having prayer meetings with the other Key Girls out behind the library steps, when I wasn’t writing poems for other girls’ boyfriends (“Make it seem like I really love him, okay?”) during my free periods on the senior benches. I had intense crushes but never had a boyfriend and I think if we’d been able to have goths in Miami in the late eighties and early nineties I’d have been one, but it’s too hot to wear velvet year-round so I had to content myself with the Disintegration album and The Mists Of Avalon.

But still, I was an ordinary kid and I’d also read all my Sweet Valleys so I knew that prom was a big deal. We didn’t do a lot of traditional high school stuff at my school but we did, in fact, have a prom and I sort of wanted to go my senior year and no one wanted to go with me. It did give me poetry-journal fodder, true, but I was at dangerous point that senior year, where I was sort of starting to accept that I just liked what I liked and that what I liked was reading books and writing stories and working with homeless people through my church but where I was also still halfway convinced that if I tried as hard as I could then I could also be one of the impossibly beautiful and unconcerned rich blond tan soccer-playing girls with which my school was rife. I couldn’t decide. What I did know was that all my friends, even my arty weird friends at school, were going to Prom and that no one wanted to go with me.

I mentioned the situation to my best guy friend at the time, who also carried a poetry journal and went with me to see Aladdin three times in the theater and who I think possibly turned out to be gay, and he said sure he’d go, if I’d pay for everything, including his tux, and I said “How would that be different from every other time we go out?” and we went back to watching Harold And Maude and that was the end of that idea. Another friend really wanted me to go in her limo and so she canvassed some of the guys she knew to see if any of them could be coerced into going with me, “just as friends, you don’t have to make out with her or anything.” (They couldn’t, and the worse part was that she’d come up to me at lunch and give me updates on who didn’t want to go with me and why: Cousin’s wedding. Had an orthodontist appointment that night. Leaving the country.)

So I didn’t have a date and I wasn’t going to go and that Saturday afternoon Ashley lost her keys so I ended up driving her around to all her prom appointments and errands, getting her hair and makeup done, picking up the boutonniere, so on and so forth. I was at her house when her date picked her up (he was wearing a tux jacket and shirt and bow tie and everything, but with jeans and Chuck hightops) when all of a sudden her mom said that they needed to drop off her boyfriend on their way to prom. Ashley shot me one look of frozen horror so I piped up, “Oh, I’ll give him a ride!” and off they went to their magical Mardi Gras-themed evening, the single most important event of the high school career, while I got into my plaid-interior 1987 Corolla and drove my best friend’s mom’s boyfriend to the marina. I have no idea what I did for the rest of the night, but I think it involved lighting candles in my room and musing on the futility of it all. I must have had a good night’s sleep because I was awake at six the next morning when Ash called me to pick her up at the house at which everyone’d spent the night.

And then thirteen years passed, and I was (mostly) over it, and then a couple of weeks ago I went to a lovely wedding at which I not only showed a little more cleavage than is legal in this state but also got to talking to some of the members of the band. I told them that I’d seen their awesome Halloween show where they dressed up like Culture Club, and, when I walked into the Tractor wearing my octopus hat, I really thought that it was 1982 and that the lead singer really was Boy George, so completely did he inhabit his outfit. “Yeah,” he said. “It was weird…they had to make me take it off. It felt…so right.” I asked if they were playing out again before I left and they said that they’d be doing an 80’s prom at the Crocodile and that I should totally show up.

I talked a big game for a couple of weeks about 80’s Prom, woo! and how I was totally going to go as a Boy-Toy-era Madonna wanna-be and I researched costumes and everything. Prom was going to be the weekend that my sweet friend Dawn was going to be in town and she was right on board…unlike those loser guys in high school…when I asked if she’d be my date. And then…well, I lost steam for a couple of days. I told her that I maybe didn’t want to go to prom but instead just wanted to stay in and watch a movie. “Well…okay, sweetie, if that’s what you want,” she replied. “I just…I’ve just been telling EVERYONE about it, you know?”

I came to my senses and immediately got in touch with Amy, Erik, and Renee, all of whom I knew would get into the spirit of the thing. Renee revealed the amazing information that not only did she still have her prom dress from 1989, and that it still fit, but that she’d finally put it on the Goodwill pile and was about to get rid of it when I told her prom was on. Renee is someone you need for something like this because she takes it very seriously and there is nothing more fun than taking ridiculous things seriously.

Dawn got in on Thursday night and Friday afternoon I took off work and we went prom shopping together. The costume I’d reserved turned out to suck so all of a sudden I was starting from zero, but fortunately I was with someone who is very calm and positive about this sort of thing, once we realized that the key to prom shopping was to get the salespeople on your side right away. At Miss Claire’s and Hot Topic and Ballard Blossom we just informed people about the exciting 80’s prom we were going to and they got right into it. The florists got extra super excited about it and made us up corsages out of purple carnations. They showed us the first one and were like, “This is hideous, right?” and we went “Right!” and they went “Perfect!” and then they went “Glitter?” and we just raised our eyebrows and they went “Awesome!” and that was that. During this whole time I was on the phone to Amy and Renee all “Okay, do you have a short-sleeved mesh top?” and “What color is your dress so we can match the corsage ribbons?” and “Can you pick me up a studded belt while you’re at Target?” and it was just all very thrilling, all the more so for me because of course I’d only gone shopping for other peoples’ proms, not my own.

Renee showed up at my house wearing…this was her outfit for the ride over…a skirt over leggings, cowboy boots, and a sweatshirt with the neck cut out. “So, like, you want to totally go to prom?” she said when I opened the door and nearly had a heart attack. Amy and Erik came over already in their prom glory and the rest of us ratted our hair and put on a lot of disgusting Wet ‘N Wild Makeup and goomie bracelets and fingerless gloves while listening to a special 80’s mix I made and drinking Cherry Coke and then all of a sudden it was time for pictures in the living room.

Me and my four dates, from left to right: Dawn, Renee, Amy and Erik.

We got there and were a little non-plussed to see that not only had we clearly put way more effort into this than anyone else except the band itself (Dawn had brought a formal from Chicago and Amy had actually bought a dress and then altered it to fit, so committed were they to this venture) but also some people were wearing, like, jeans and tee shirts. To be fair, a lot of people were in fact wearing prom outfits, but none of them looked as good as any of us and we were sure that we’d all win the costume contests.

The Dudley Manlove Quartet. SENIORS RULE!

I voted for them as Cutest Couple. (Even though there was no actual category for that). Erik, by the way, reports that his sweat band did an excellent job of actually keeping the sweat out of his eyes, just as it’s meant to do.

Please ignore my crazy face that I’m making and the red-eye I forgot to eliminate and concentrate only on Dawn’s beautiful smile and on my KICK-ASS GOOMIE BRACELETS. Every time I clapped or threw my hands in the air I kept looking at my arms and thinking, “Wow, that looks really good.” I also noticed how comfortable my lace leggings were and how natural it felt to have a gigantic bow in my hair. The anklets with heels, though, those weren’t as great.

Singing Total Eclipse Of The Heart and rocking those leg warmers.

Renee knows this much is true.

Soon it was time for the Prom King and Queen to be crowned…we’d all voted for Renee for Prom Queen, of course, and we thought that she would win for sure because people had been coming up to her all night and told her how great she looked and how amazing it was that she had worn it to her actual prom…she even had her original prom picture with her in her purse and was showing it to everyone as proof of her awesomeness. We waited with bated breath to hear her name called when! They named someone else! This total mean girl who was super drunk and stepped on Amy’s feet twice with her heels and also wanted to trade her stupid fake beads for Renee’s awesome plastic bangles! Her husband was named King and they groped each other on the dance floor while we stood back and stared the icy stares of the unfairly wronged at them. We were robbed, man. There is just nothing else to say, except that we should have stuffed the ballot box as the so-called “King” and “Queen” CLEARLY did.

There was nothing for it but to fashion Renee her own sash out of some decorations that fell on the floor. She will always be the Prom Queen of my heart.

It was a slightly weird crowd and of course we were heartbroken that all our costume planning came to naught, prize-wise, but overall it was a super fun night and I feel that my non-prom-ability of the nineties has been totally vindicated by my extreme 80’s prom-ness in 2006. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to wear all my goomie bracelets again because they just feel so right on my arms, and I feel pretty hot for having gone from no prom dates when I was in high school to four prom dates as an adult.

Oh, and you know what else happened? I got my very first pickup line ever in my life. I was dancing around, obeying the lead singer’s injunction to “do the Molly Ringwald” when some guy put a cold bottle of beer on the small of my back (which was exposed, due to my very exciting midriff-baring “shirt”). I whipped around and stared at him uncomprehendingly. “You look really hot,” he stammered. “So I…thought I’d cool you down.”