We've Only Just Begun

I’m super excited to have been invited to join a blog group alongside three talented bloggers.  Each week, one of us chooses a topic and we all post a blog entry on that topic, usually on Thursdays.   

Here are the links to the other fabulous blogs:

Merryland Girl

Froggie

Moma Rock  

Moma Rock chose this week’s topic:  Tell us about your first homecoming/prom/formal . . . and don’t forget the photos!  If you didn’t go to any high school dances, why not?  What did you end up doing instead?  Here’s my take:

I’ll be honest:  I don’t much remember my first formal dance.  I know I went to several (including my Junior Ring Dance and my Senior Prom), but it was a long time ago (I am the OLDEST member of my blogging group, ahem) and, frankly, the memories just weren’t that special.  I know somewhere – in a box in my garage back in Evanston, in a box in the closet of my old bedroom at my parents’ house – sits a stack of photos of me and my high school boyfriend, Mark, shiny faced and bad-hairdoed and overdressed, corsages hanging from our chests, cheesy smiles plastered to our sweaty faces.  But I haven’t looked at those in years.  And I likely won’t look at them for many years more.

I wasn’t a big fan of high school.  I usually say I hated high school, but hate is a strong word.  It’s more that I “greatly disliked” it.  High school held few redeeming qualities, mostly centered around the handful of good friendships I made and have been lucky enough to keep to this day, or around my two years writing for and editing the school newspaper.  And, really, other than a couple of good teachers (including Mr. Busch, who called us “a lovely lot of ladies” and told us the story of ripping his “trousers” when he locked his keys in his car, and Mr. Mazzulla, who was known to toss chalkboard erasers at girls who weren’t paying attention), that’s about it. 

I can’t really explain my dislike of high school.  I usually blame it on the fact it was “all-girls” and “Catholic” and “uniformed,” but I doubt it’s that simple.  Nothing ever is.  I’m sure the addition of boys at the least would have made high school more interesting – but it also would have required me to give a damn about how I looked every morning (when the only males are the History teachers and the guy who cleans the Caf, perfectly applied makeup suddenly seems low priority).

Even though I was surrounded by hundreds of other girls on a daily basis, I managed to scrounge up a boyfriend, my go-to date for formals.  I met Mark when I worked as a candy girl at the movie theater near my house.  Mark was an usher at the theater, and he attended my school’s “brother school,” Gordon Tech, which was “all-boys” and “Catholic” and probably just as uneventful as mine (but full of a lot more testosterone).  Mark and I dated for a few years.  He was a good first boyfriend:  nice, attentive, generous, and patient.  We did the high school boyfriend/girlfriend things, including exchanging class rings (he wore mine around his neck; I layered yarn around the back of his so it would fit on my finger). 

All of this made for a “normal” high school experience (at least in my neighborhood) but none of it made for a particularly interesting or memorable time in my life.

When I think about prom and the other formals as Moma Rock asked, I generally feel uncomfortable.  And that’s because I wasn’t very comfortable in my own skin back then.  I loathed looking for a dress.  I was fat.  Nothing pretty fit me.  I held no clue how to apply makeup or do my hair, and so my photos feature the classic ‘80s blue eye shadow (and mascara and nail polish) and permed, Aqua-netted hair.  My eyebrows were reminiscent of my ungroomed Eastern European relatives – both female and male.  I didn’t look good, and I didn’t feel good, either.  Pouring myself into a frilly dress and dyed-to-match high heels equated with putting lipstick on a pig, at least to me.

So it’s no wonder I don’t think often about prom or the Christmas Dance or the Junior Ring Dance.  I don’t want to.  I don’t want to remember. 

A few years ago, my eldest daughter went to her prom.  Her experience was everything mine was not.  She made it look so, so easy.  And she?  Looked absolutely beautiful.  She ordered her dress online WITHOUT TRYING ON FIFTY DRESSES THAT ALL MADE HER LOOK FAT, and when it arrived, it merely needed to be pressed.  It fit her like a glove, a beautiful royal blue glove.  A generous friend opened her home to a bunch of the girls, and together they did their own hair and makeup in front of the huge house’s huge bathroom mirror before taking photos in the house’s huge Italianate backyard.  (In her pictures, my daughter looks to have “prommed” somewhere off the Amalfi Coast.)  And then my child and her friends slid into a pair of limos and drove to downtown Chicago, where her tuxeodoed boyfriend met them and they spent the evening having the time of their young lives.

I don’t know whether my daughter will look back fondly on her prom, but I know I will.  I will cherish those photos, and I’ve shown them off as I once did her baby pictures.  And I know the beauty in those pictures lies not only in my child’s ridiculously high cheek bones, or in her gorgeous blue eyes, or in her long, wavy horse’s mane of chestnut hair, or in the dress that looks like it was made just for her, but also in her confidence, her assuredness that she looks good and feels good and that she will have a good time.  I hope someday she will understand my memory of that night, the night I truly saw her as the beautiful adult she’d since become, the night she replaced the blurry, time-faded images in my mind with a crisp memory I pray I won’t ever forget.