Promography

I love proms:  prom scenes in films, prom pictures, prom dresses, prom stories (the more disastrous the better) but I did not love my actual prom. It was probably a perfectly fine prom, to be fair, but my own prom story is going to need some dramatic flourishes before it is ready to be told to my daughter, that's for sure.

I don’t remember the theme, but I do recall that it was held at the lodge at Gunstock. I drove because my date was not yet driving age (he was young but a perfectly nice prom date—I was right in seeing potential in him, too, as he ended up being prom king two years later.)  My dress was not too bad by 1980s standards, but those standards were very, very low. It was a black brocade with white bow, very simple, and I have a strong suspicion my mother, who went dress shopping with me, talked me down from some sort of ball gown or something with a glittery bow.  I had left school early that day to get my hair, probably two inches long all around, cut even shorter (why? I’ll never know) and to get my makeup done, which involved layers of blue and white eye shadow and thick blue eyeliner. The final touch that made the look complete? White fingerless gloves.

Satisfied with the result, I picked up my date and brought him back to my house so that my parents could take very dark instant Polaroid pictures—then off to dinner at the Margate with some friends, and to the prom itself. I only remember how dark the lodge was—it looked as though the building had lost power and they had improvised with a few battery-operated Christmas lights. The next memory that emerges is sitting in a car in front of an after-prom party, hearing the laughter echoing from the porch of a house near Gilford Beach, discussing with my date whether to go in. I decided not to—I am not sure why—and then I dropped him off, went home, and read the rest of Ann Rule's The Want-Ad Killer. This seems a good place to mention that my failure to remember these events has nothing to do with any alcohol consumption, as the one drink I had during all four years of high school, as I have mentioned previously, was one half of a Miller Lite mixed with 7UP, because I hated the taste of alcohol.  Also no drugs, but that might have been because no one ever offered me any.

Sometimes my students, when writing about their lives, write things like “I don’t believe in regrets because everything is a learning experience.” They sometimes imagine regret—or the desire to change the past at all—as a kind of admission of failure or weakness. While I would never wish to go back in time (well, maybe to that one time at age 6 when the ice cream truck broke down in front of our house and we got all the free ice cream) I do wish I had known this: that being so caught up in the idea of having fun makes actually having fun impossible.  This is something I do plan to tell my daughter, especially if she's trying to convince me that a limo and a $500 dinner are prerequisites for an event she will remember for a lifetime. No, it isn't, and no...you probably won't.