My Dog Ate My Blog: Prom Prom Squad

A few weeks ago I was contacted by Elizabeth of My Dog Ate My Blog, a cool blog about politics, technology, education, and pop-culture, inquiring about a potential guest post. I was highly skeptical of this request for two reasons: first, Elizabeth claimed to have read my blog; second, she claimed to have liked it. Neither of these two claims have ever been confirmed to be true by any real person, so naturally I figured it was a scam. But upon my reply, Elizabeth requested that a member of her team write a guest post. A bit befuddled, I struggled to come up with a topic that would be relevant to her excellent and topical blog. I requested a post about Prom, a topic near and dear, let's be honest, to everyone's heart. J. Henry was kind enough to offer this memory, which I think captures the wonderfully horrific essence of that evening. I thank everyone at My Dog Ate My Blog, please check out their cool site! Enjoy.

PROM PROM SQUAD

Jesus Christ, really, you want me to write about prom? What is there to say that isn’t conveyed in this haiku:

Olive Garden food

Look at the pretty girls, shit

After, Nick at Nite

What I’m trying to say is, I’m not sure if I’ve ever known anyone for whom prom didn’t completely blow. And if it their prom didn’t blow, they’re probably an asshole.

My prom started out “alright,” I suppose. I’m from rural central Florida, the kind of place where the only mall in an hour radius has a KMart in it, so there wasn't exactly a lot of great places to look for dresses. My ’83 Volkswagen Jetta wasn’t capable of making it the two hours to Tampa to find a real store, so I got a cheap, white, flapper-style dress from the nearby JC Penny. (The prom was 1920s themed.)

My boyfriend Greg and I were preparing to go to off to college on opposite coasts, and we had begun slowly tearing each other part. This was the era before social networks, where the only place to express the pain of a dying relationship was your AOL instant messaging profile. I think I probably had some whiny ass Cat Power quote in it at this point—“ I will miss your heart so tender/ And I will love/ This love forever.” This for a guy who still had a poster of a Lamborghini on his bedroom wall.

What I’m getting at is that for us, prom had become this big important thing, our last hurrah, so to say. We had endowed it with all this meaning, which is of course a recipe for ending up home at 11pm watching Cash Cab together on his parents’ couch. But I digress.

He picked me up in his dad’s vintage Aston Martin convertible, which looked badass, but whose mechanical prowess would later become suspect. We drove to dinner at a chain Italian restaurant, though I’m proud to say it wasn’t actually the Olive Garden. After I stuffed myself with lasagna, we went to the Greek Orthodox Church that was housing the dance itself. It was one of those churches with “modern” architecture, but there’s still something disconcerting about teens bumping and grinding under a giant wooden cross.

We drank punch and ate snacks, waiting for more people to arrive and fill the awkwardly bare dance floor. Being the cool motherfuckers that we were, it wasn’t even 10 yet. If only I had been smart enough to have a flask of something strapped to my thigh, it probably would’ve been a lot more enjoyable. The cheerleaders and football players filed in about 20 minutes before the prom ended, after getting dropped off by their Hummer stretch limo.

Our spirits had dropped dangerously low. It hadn’t been a magical movie montage night for us. We were tired of dancing and pretending to be enjoying ourselves, so we bailed before the thing was even over. As we got into the Aston Martin, it started pouring rain, one of those torrential Florida downpours. Greg didn’t know how to get the top up on the car, and we struggled with it, my white dress becoming see-through in the process. After he finally got the roof on, we started down the road, only to discover that it wouldn’t stay shut on its own; we had to hold it up as we drove down the highway, which it turns out, takes a lot of strength. We drove to a gas station where we heard some of our friends were meeting up before going to after parties. No one was there. We went home and were too wet and ornery to even consider getting busy in his bed, while his parents slept soundly across the house. I lied down on the couch and briefly considered checking the TV for any crappy late night shows before promptly passing out.

J. Henry is a guest blogger for Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on criminal justice degree online for Guide to Online Schools.