In the 80's, I went to four
proms. Four
silly,
expensive proms that all ended up quite disappointingly. Most of the time, for most people, prom does end up that way, because nothing on the face of the planet can actually be as
wonderful in real life as your
imagination tells you it's going to be while you're going nuts getting ready for it. My last prom, at my own
high school during my senior year, (my "real" prom, I began to call it,) I wore a sleeveless,
metallic pink dress with a big puffy skirt because I had to look as much like
Cyndi Lauper as I could manage. My date was an enormously
cheap dork with two left feet and a perpetual
boner. The
shrimp they served made me
vomit. The
ugly, Assistant
Crack Whore my very recently ex-ed
ex-boyfriend dumped
me for wore the exact same dress I did. The "theme" of the thing was
Bon Jovi's "Never Say Goodbye" and the infinite
wisdom of my school's
administration made the DeeJay re"mix" the song so that the lines "with a
six pack and a radio" and "remember when we lost the keys, and you lost more than that in my
backseat, baby" were
scrambled beyond easy recognition. Lame,
lame, lame. Exponentially lame.
Infinite mega-lameness. But I'm glad I went to the
stupid things. Now I'm an old crumudgeon, and I can recognize Bon Jovi's music for the insipid tripe that it was, and I can see that Cyndi Lauper was actually just more strange-looking than talented. But the
story value remains reasonably good, and I don't have to wonder if I would have missed something that would have been an important part of my eventual self-actualization as an
adult. (I wouldn't have, as it turns out.) I have four silly dresses to show my own kids when they're looking for a laugh. I have four
champagne flutes with high school logos on them, and everyone needs at least one of those. I have photos of myself looking completely
ridiculous, while feeling like a freaking
runway model. (At least for as long asthe
requisite "Family Photo Sessions" were going on. That feeling went rather quickly away once I got to the damned dance and noticed that everyone there was taller, tanner, and
bigger-breasted than I. That's frequently how one thinks when one is a
teenager, you know.
Anyway, going to your prom doesn't necessarily make you an uncreative conformist. It just makes you glad when it's all over that you don't have to do any of that high school crap ever again, and that in itself is worth something.