A Very 90s Prom Night

When you grow up in a small mountain town, dances take on a whole new meaning (think Footloose with slightly less fervent religious undertones). Prom Night is the Queen Mother of these events, reserved for the Juniors and Seniors of the High School and their respective dates. Given that the town I grew up in was particularly small it was tradition that most kids would leave the mountain to go to eat, and then travel back up to attend the actual dance. Luckily the snow usually had abated by the time Prom Night came around, so getting off and back onto the mountain was usually very easily done.

Prom Night Preparation seems to take about three hundred times as long as the actual night does. For nearly every dance I attended the biggest hurdle seemed to always be who I was going to ask to suffer through an evening of being my date. Once I had conned a lovely young lady into voluntarily agreeing to spending a couple of modestly chaperoned hours with me, the next step of course was obtaining the corsage. You learn quickly not to buy anything until your date's dress color has been determined. Only then can you rent a tux and buy an accompanying flower.

Senior Prom of course means the Senior Prom Parental Photo Shoot. We all have a box somewhere with photos hastily taken by parents as you and your date rushed out the door. As I kid you never want to take the time to stop and model for your parents; or at least I never did. The only advice I can give to anyone about to attend their Prom is to stop and enjoy the little moments like this. When you get to be old and fat, you'll have those little frozen-frames to look back on, and it helps to have more than just a couple.

When you're seventeen years old there aren't very many choices for you to take your date. For my date and I we loaded into my dad's new Mercedes (was I trying to impress her or what?), with another couple that was attending the dance with us and we drove to Palm Springs. Once there we met a few other couples at Kobe Japanese Steak House and we had what at the time was the most elegant dinner I'd ever had without my parents in attendance.

This was a slightly more innocent time so there weren't any metal detectors to walk through, but our Principal and Vice-Principal were both there to greet us all, shake our hands and look for any signs of contraband consumption. After passing the field sobriety checkpoint were then permitted to enter the dance itself. About half of us decided to take our pictures upon arrival, and the other half later in the night. Sometimes you just have to dance a little bit before you do much of anything else!

The night's theme had been a Midnight Cruise and as was tradition in our tiny town, the Junior Class Officers had planned and put on the prom for the senior class. They had set up mock gaming tables and the food and drink selection was made to seem like a high-class cruise ship's would be. We played table games and danced with each other that night, partying like it was almost 1999.

For some still as yet unknown reason I was actually on the Prom Court that year. Alas, I didn't win, but what made it fun was that all of us were good friends so it was pretty easy to say "Who cares?" when most of us didn't win the crown. I wish i could find the picture we all took together as the Prom Court, but those pictures are probably stashed in a shoebox or something far, far out of sight.

The music that night was very typical of the time. I couldn't tell you any song specifically that I danced to though. I'm afraid the years have managed to fuzzy that up for me a bit. I do remember having a great time out on the crowded dance floor. After all, how could you not feel great when you were in formal attire, sweatily dancing with about a hundred other adolescents? If your time as a teenager could be perfectly encapsulated into a singular moment, Prom Night would probably be it.

When the night was over, my date and I dropped the other couple we'd driven with all night off at their homes, and then we went to her house. Up to this point I'd had no real way of knowing if my date had enjoyed herself. Well, she hadn't screamed at me, nor run off in tears, so I'd assumed it wasn't at least the worst experience of her young life. As I walked her to her door and thanked her for coming along, I got confirmation in the form of that cliche yet still undeniably great feeling sign of a good time had by all: The Goodnight Kiss.

Dinner, Dancing and a sweet little kiss at the end. If nothing else I felt confident that the night could have gone terribly worse than this; and it hadn't. Years later my date is also a friend of mine on Facebook and we have semi-regular interactions with each other, so I guess that's even further confirmation, more than a decade later, that I'd managed not to completely ruin a momentous moment in her life. Mission accomplished.