"The Prom"

“The Prom,” Ira Glass intones solemnly as the host of This American Life out of Chicago Public Radio: “We don’t make kids go into the Army in this country. We don’t make them go to college. We don’t make them get married. But if they’re still in school when they’re 18, they collide with the impenetrable fact that is the Prom. And then they have to take a stand: Go, not go, use it to try to climb to a new group of friends, use it to try and get the girl, just try to get through it….”“The older we get the more we tend to roll our eyes at the idea of Prom,” he goes on, and yet he says what we forget is how thrilling the whole thing seemed at the time.How thrilling it still seems, is what I say. Why else would hundreds of us plain old citizens gather each year as we gathered in my town last week to watch this year’s crop of high schoolers promenade past us two by two toward the buses waiting to carry them to the rented hall where the dance will take place?Again this year the boys came buttoned into their tuxes, cinched tight at neck and waist with bow tie and cummerbund.  Again this year the girls came dressed in dazzling versions of off-the-shoulder chic, with how many innocent flowers pinched at the stem and stabbed through the heart to serve as corsages!It’s how a lot of us felt on prom night: Pinched at the stem if not stabbed through the heart. So much rides on that one frail evening.In the months leading up to my own prom all I could do on my way to sleep was nurse this vision of the perfected self I would be that night. Maybe I saw it as a kind of reward for all the 20-hour days I had put in over four years’ time, on homework and play practice, on chorus rehearsal and all that prepping for the SATs. Perhaps not much has changed since then. In any case the day arrives at last with its attendant drama.I had become single in the course of my senior year and so had shopped for someone I could go with and feel relaxed around. I found that someone in a genial easy-going boy from the town’s Catholic school which had the bad manners to schedule its own graduation on that very same night.We got to the prom at 9:30 and left at 10:30 because that’s what kids did then: we  left early and went and sat in some ordinary restaurant for two hours, and only then drove to someone’s house to change clothes and stay up all night talking.But oh, that genial and easy-going boy. He produced a half-bottle of champagne for us to toast with when we first got to the parking lot where the prom was being held. I made him pour it out because I was NOT a genial and easy-going girl and how I regret that now, you boy, who I can see as if you stand before me with your wide grin and your thick blond hair. Halfway through college you died in a plane crash and changed forever the way I look at life.“It’s all so fragile” is what I now think, watching the young people march past. And also, “Let them grow old, God.”  Just let them grow old and have the joy of watching the waves of other young ones coming and coming and coming up behind them.