I never went to a prom. I don’t say that looking for sympathy…though anyone who wants to say “Aw!!!” and buy me a latte to help me feel better should feel free to do so. No, I say that because this is one event where the protocol has changed dramatically since my youth, back in the days when wheels were square and CD’s were called eight tracks. And it’s changed for the good, which is wonderful.
I can still remember walking into the dining room not long before prom time and hearing my mother on the phone trying to find me a date. It’s one of those moments where you think you are going to die of embarrassment and can’t understand how it isn’t happening. Not only was she on the phone to friends trying to get them to force one of their sons to invite me to the prom, ultimately she wasn’t successful. So I not only didn’t go, but I didn’t go knowing that even parental influence couldn’t get a boy to want to take me.
Of course, many years have gone by since that incident and I find that it no longer even makes the top twenty-five list of most horrifying and embarrassing moments of my life. Which says something about my life I suppose, but probably says something more about life in general. By the time we hit what I like to refer to as the terminal stages of middle age, we’ve all racked up enough embarrassing moments to make a long, long list.
When I got to college, I was into the counterculture movement in a big way. I think I was attracted by the fact that you didn’t have to have taste in clothes to belong. Since clothing has always been a big mystery to me, the counterculture movement was a lifesaver. I am constitutionally unable to differentiate what last year’s fashions looked like compared to this year and am even more unable to figure out why I should care. My fashion sense can be summed up quite simply. Wear only blue, black or brown. Then almost everything goes with almost everything else.
So you can understand that I didn’t go to my college proms either. Guys in the counterculture movement were way too busy making sure their poncho hung correctly and their VW van was appropriately decorated to bother with such a bourgeois concept as a prom. They were going to change the world, one reefer at a time. Between that and the munchies, there was simply no time left for cummerbunds.
But oh how I secretly wanted to go anyway. I couldn’t because back then you could only go with a date. Girls didn’t go alone and certainly didn’t go as a group. The only things girls did as a group for the prom was decorate for it.
But that has changed now and I am so thrilled that it has. Nowadays girls go to the prom because they want to go to the prom and they don’t let the lack of a date stop them. In fact, I know a couple of young ladies who chose to go with friends rather than a date because they felt they would have a better time that way.
Where did these girls get that courage? Where did they learn how to stand up and announce that the idea of a prom was to get dressed and have fun and dance and giggle and that there was no reason to not do all that just because some silly boy was too shy to ask you out?
I was at Simon and Seafort’s a few weeks ago on what was clearly a prom night. Girls sat there in stunningly beautiful dresses looking ever so self-conscious and grown up. Across from them sat young men who, in their very own liberation moment, were dressed in such a variety of formal dress as to shame my generation who could only come up with a black tux and red cummerbund. But there were also tables full of girls, all of whom looked equally beautiful, all of whom were having just as good of a time as the more traditional tables of boy-girl pairings.
I looked at those girls and I envied them. And then I thought how odd that really was. In my youth I’d envied the girls with the dates. Now I envy those girls who at such a young age have learned to make their own fun and happiness and not wait for someone to make it for them.
Had I known then what I know now, I’d have gone to my prom. Granted I would have probably been wearing a formal tie-dyed T-shirt with granny skirt, but I would have been there.