Dear
Auntie MJ, senior year of high school has a lot of accompanying feelings. Prom
is coming up and it’s looking like I’ll be the only one in my friend group
without a date. However, I think I might be catching feelings for someone I
barely know. Is it worth trying to strengthen that connection, even though we
will part ways for college soon? And how can I make the most out of the prom
situation? Xoxo
Dear
Emberia,
There
are two questions here, and they require two distinct answers. Let us divide
and conquer.
Question
one: Is it worth trying to strengthen the connection with someone you barely
know right before you leave for college and ask this person to prom?
Answer:
Sure. Why not? Going to college is not like going off to the Hunger Games. It’s just moving to a different place. Sometimes it is not even that. Yes, things get shaken up, but that’s okay. I think the implication here is that asking someone to the prom is a Big Deal and if you have feelings, what happens to those feelings when you move to a new school? I don’t know. But I think you should go for it. Don’t use college as an excuse not to get to know someone. We have the internet now. And even without the internet, people did this kind of stuff all the time. Auntie MJ sees no downside to taking a chance on this. If you need inspiration to take a chance, watch this and be inspired by their sweaters.
Question two: How can you make the most of the prom situation?
Answer: Auntie MJ had to sit back and take a deep breath before answering this one. She thought of her own prom. She wrote about this prom back in 2006, but that is long enough now (and the post has been partially eaten by a web publishing service that shall remain unnamed but is WordPress). I managed to dig up a copy of what I wrote, and I think it bears reprinting here, in the hopes that you can gain Wisdom from my experience.
See, our prom
was about rules. It was about obedience. It was about training. And they
started us early.
From our first
days at school, we were taught that as formless, breastless freshman*, we were
way too clueless to be allowed to wear things like heels. There was a
complicated order to things relating to yearly dances, and each year it was
reinforced in our heads. It went like this:
FRESHMAN YEAR
NOT A PROM. A freshman dinner dance. Party dresses only, knee length minimum. Heels at a
maximum of one inch. No limos. No tuxes.
SOPHOMORE YEAR
NOT A PROM. A Soph Hop. Slightly more fancy party dresses, knee length minimum. Same heel
height. No limos. No tuxes.
JUNIOR YEAR
A PROM. Tea
length dresses permitted, knee length minimum. NO FLOOR LENGTH DRESSES. Two
inch heels. No limos. No tuxes.
SENIOR YEAR
THE END OF THE
KNOWN UNIVERSE. THE KING OF PROMS.
Now, it got
complicated.
Floor length
dresses were permitted. Tuxes were permitted. Limos were permitted. Heel length
remained constant at two inches. The main thing
to know is that we weren’t permitted to wear strapless dresses. No way, no how.
That went for any dance, and this fact was drummed into our heads on every
possible opportunity. However, every
year the faculty actually voted on whether or not seniors could wear spaghetti
strap dresses. This was such a huge deal that it merited a yearly discussion.
It was vetoed
for our year.
We also had,
like I mentioned previously, prom classes. This is when our senior year
religion class was taken over for a week or two, and we were taught things like
plate settings. This is when we had the mysterious Kleenex discussion, and when
we were told not to get out of the car until our date opened the door.
And we also
learned the schedule of how our prom was going to go down, just in case we were
even thinking of having any fun.
Our arrival was
to take place between 8 and 8:30. NO EXCEPTIONS. Failure to show up by 8:30
could result in the holding of our diploma.** Departure could
not be before midnight, but could not be after twelve thirty.
The school
brought in a “beauty expert,” a truly odious woman who taught us things like an
exercise to keep our chins from getting flabby (slapping them) and that the
cure for acne was more makeup. She was so insidious that at least two of my
friends managed to walk out of the assembly, which was no minor feat. At my school, that was basically the equivalent of setting fire to your chair.
I bought a white
satin dress for the prom. In retrospect, this was a strange choice, as I am
pretty white myself. I am the color of porcelain and whole milk and daisy
petals, if you’re romantic, and like someone in need of a transfusion if you’re
not.*** I loved my
white dress and white gloves. My dresses
for the other years had all been a bit tragic****, but this one, this one I loved.
Exhibit A:The author of this piece and her friend Laurie (in green), on the way to prom. Laurie is, quite fairly, questioning the expression on my face. I think she sensed that I might be going into this thing with a less-than-enthusiastic attitude. This dress *looks* sleeveless, but what I did was pull those sides up over my shoulders so it had the appearance of sleeves. This would be a key factor in my arrival at the prom.
A group of us
all went off to the prom together, after driving from house to house and
picking everyone up, getting 200 pictures taken. Then we divided up into cars.
I got into the one with one of my best and closet friends in the whole world.
Her name is Kirsten. We left in plenty of time to get there by 8:00
or 8:30.
Kirsten’s
boyfriend was driving us. She was up in the passenger’s seat, and I was in the
back with my date. I remember it being a fun ride, right up until the time we
got stuck in a massive traffic jam at 8:10. But we weren’t that far. We still
had more than enough time.
Except that we
hadn’t moved at 8:15. And not really that much by 8:20. Or five minutes after
that. By now, Kir was getting seriously, seriously nervous.
“Re,” she said,
leaning into the back seat. (My nickname is high school was Re. Only people who
went to high school are allowed to call me this. It’s kind of a personal rule.)
“Re,” she said
again, drawing me back from my own parenthetical interruption. “It’s 8:25.”
I looked at the
clock on the dashboard. She was right.
“Well,” I said.
“How far are we?”
“About seven or
eight blocks,” her boyfriend said.
“We’re almost
there,” I said to her.
“Yes. But we’re not there yet. And we might not be there in five minutes.”
I saw her point. We were going to graduate. We were going to get out of high school.
“We can go seven
or eight blocks in five minutes,” I said nervously. “Right?”
Wrong. By 8:28
we had gotten about two blocks closer.
“Re,” she said,
leaning back again. “This time, seriously. We have to go.”
“Go how? We still have five or six blocks left.”
“I know. That’s
why we have to go. Now.”
She opened her
car door and got out. I followed.
“What are you
doing?” I said, following her to the sidewalk. “We have two minutes.”
“If we don’t
go,” she said. “They’re going to hold our diplomas.”
“And so, what?
We run?”
Instead of
answering this question in words, she responded in action. She started running
down the street. And I ran right after her.
I’m not sure if
you’ve tried to run in heels and a floor-length dress down a city sidewalk
before. You probably haven’t. I don’t really recommend it. Especially if you
are trying to preserve you hair and makeup and not get anything on your stark
while dress and shoes, and if you are carrying long-stemmed roses and a purse.
I didn’t spend a lot of time in heels back then. Our days were spent wearing our
fabulous and sensible school shoes, so I wasn’t all that steady at normal
walking pace. So running on a sidewalk (notorious surfaces on the best of days)
was really a lot more than I was ready to take on. Also, we were the official
show of all that stopped traffic.
Exhibit B: Our actual school shoes. They float in the clouds because wearing them is like being in a dream.
Bizarrely enough, this may have been the one physical act that my school had
truly prepared me for. Since we didn’t have showers, we were always told to try
not to sweat in gym. This doesn’t seem like something you can normally request
or control, but we had actually learned to do this.
So we ran. We
ran because we actually believed that we might not graduate high school
if we didn’t. Kir and I, aside from being the non-Catholics, were both honor students. We weren’t
at the very top, but we were far from the bottom. And yet, we were still
afraid that we might not be able to go to college or ever, ever leave our high
school just because we got stuck in traffic.
We arrived, out
of breath, at 8:32. Our dates had no caught up with us. We barged into the hall
on our own. Our principal was waiting there, clipboard in hand.
“Running a little late, are we?” she said.
It had to have
been completely obvious that we had just been running. Our hair was all blown
around, we were breathing too heavily to answer.
“And where are
you dates?” she continued.
We heaved for breath and pointed at
the door, indicating that they were somewhere in the world.
“Girls,” she
said, in a warning tone. “You were told when to arrive.”
“We got stuck in
traffic, Sister,” Kir said.
Sister shook her
head and wrote something down.
“Bring your
dates and go and greet everyone,” she said. “Everyone has been waiting for
you.”
That last bit
was meant to sting. See, it wasn’t over yet. At our school, there was a
receiving line at the proms.
“Receiving
line?” you ask. “What do you mean by that?”
I mean that you
had to walk around and introduce your date to every single faculty member that
turned up, and they ALL turned up. An entire WALL OF NUNS. I’m talking about
twenty-five or so. Seriously. And you had to say hello to every single last one
of them and have your date shake their hand, and if they wanted to talk, you
stood there and talked.
And here’s the really important part of this: the lobby area of the place where we had our prom? Mirrored on all
sides. So it looked like THOUSANDS OF NUNS. I think this is the same trick they
used in that last scene of Star Wars, when they go and get their medals, and
there are millions of rebel alliance fighters all lined up. And not just thousands of nuns … thousands of nuns that had been denied the pre-dinner snacks because Kir and I were “late.”
Exhibit C: Let’s go to the prom.
In a class of 125 girls, having twenty five to thirty dedicated chaperones patrolling the edges of the floor, ready, willing, and able to bust in to any couple making out for more than 30 seconds (the limit) … it all makes for a fairly controlled experience. Kir and I spent the whole night not really knowing what had been written on the clipboard, and it was a while (weeks, really) before we were convinced that we were in the clear.
How does this help you, my dear Emberia? I admit I am not sure. It proves a person can run in heels and not sweat. That’s something, isn’t it?
I guess the best lesson is that the prom? Is a dance. It’s not the be-all, end-all of anything. Anyone who thinks that the prom is somehow a measure of what the rest of life will be like has either not left high school yet (and thus has no idea that they are wrong) or are people think life is high school. Which it is not. Dance if you want to dance or sit around and talk if you want to talk. If it’s extremely fun, great! If it’s boring, no big deal! If it’s a disaster, you will have a story to tell FOR YEARS AND YEARS. If it is a weird list of rules and you have to run down the street to get to it and there are millions of nuns there, you will become a YA author and live in my house.
Good luck out there. I will be thinking of you.
Love,
Auntie MJ
* Our chests were measured in the gym a few weeks before Freshman year in order to order our vests. The highlight was that we had a Breast-Size Guessing Nun who could just look at us and predict how much we would grow, chestwise, in the next four years and she would SHOUT THESE RESULTS across the gym, because the person writing down the sizes was across the gym for some reason. So people would be evaluated by the BSGN and she would say things like, “THIS ONE IS FLAT AS A BOARD. GET HER A SMALL. THAT’S ALL SHE’LL NEED.”
** They really hammered this home.
*** Recent events and blood tests have shown that I am exactly the kind of person who needs a blood transfusion. The pale skin is due to very low iron. We didn’t know it then. We just knew I was the one person who never really seemed to tan.
**** This is an understatement. The other dresses were all J.C. Penny closeouts from the bridal department. I’ve lost all records of the first one. The second one is a massive floral print, like something designed to attract sight-impaired bees. The nicest thing I can say about the third one is that it looks extremely flammable.
The design of that shoe is both a mystery and an answer.
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