Stairway to Heaven
Funny that I was just writing yesterday about my teaching days when all of a sudden someone put this up on my Facebook page. It’s from the year I ran the prom and these are the students on the Prom Committee.
I can almost name every one of them.
That’s Nancy Camelo standing over to the right, that much I’m sure of.
She was a good friend to a girl named Barbra who called her "Poco" because she often wore her hair in braids, which is how we all pictured Pocahontas back then.
Barbra herself would not have been in this picture. She didn’t actually GO to the high school that year but came around a lot with her guitar anyway and sat in the back of the class, adding greatly to the discussion. (I was an English teacher so there was always plenty of discussion.)
You’d never get away with that kind of thing today, having a student who didn’t actually go to the school coming to class anyway but that was the 70s for you. I was invited to teach four electives and write the curriculum myself.
Though she didn’t go to the high school Barbra did go to the prom – in a tux - and back in the 70s doing a thing like that was pretty much unheard of.
I remember on the big night when the headmaster called me over, pointed to her and said, “What is THAT one?” I had no idea what he meant.
"She’s a human female" I said, probably rather jarringly. He said he knew that.
Anyone could see that, though she was a bit of a tomboy. She always reminded me of how Scout Finch would look at 17.
I wonder now if I should have said, “THAT one? That's a young human being."
But I was more timid then and very young myself and did not understand quite yet that men ran the world and intended to keep running it for some time to come. I guess that didn’t happen now did it?
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Here are some generic prom kids from the era now. And underneath them that endless song that gave that prom its name.
