Ciderella, Your Dress Has Arrived

I saw a story on CNN this morning that almost warmed my icy heart. It was about a high school girl in New Orleans. Her family lost everything during hurricane Katrina, including her pink prom dress. Seeing as teen girls have a different set of priorities than the rest of us, this was a huge deal. Her future was in jeopardy. How would she face her prom date? Just when all seemed lost, good fortune stepped in.

A high school in Maryland had been watching the Katrina coverage like the rest of us. While most of us were outraged at the conditions and worried about the welfare of the citizenry, this fine young woman had a different focus. She began collecting prom dresses to send to her fashion ravaged sisters South of the Mason/Dixon. She had hoped to collect one hundred dresses, but because of the generosity and sisterhood not normally demonstrated by teenage girls, she received enough to fill a semi. The girl in New Orleans got her pretty pink prom dress (damn I love alliteration). Now her Molly Ringwald fantasies can become reality. I hope Ducky shows up to sweep her off her feet. Oh Ducky, always misunderstood.

That's a sweet story isn't it? The only problem is that it reminded me of my own prom. Mine was not the prom of a John Hughes movie. No, mine was the prom from a Steven King movie. My date didn't set fire to the ballroom or shower me with pig's blood, but the experience was just as horrifying. Expectations for these kind of events are always high. It is the social centerpiece of your high school years and the pressure to have it live up to the legend is almost unbearable.

High school was not a barrel of laughs for me. I look back at it as a four year stretch in a minimum security prison. I got to leave at night, but I knew I had to go back in the morning. I didn't really fit in with the preppy, Ivy League bound crowd that populated my "College prep". Things started to look up in my Senior year. I knew that I would be released soon and my future looked rosy. The fates had even blessed me with a girlfriend. I know, pretty cool. I had my prom date all set, no need to search one out, or have to go through the hassle of disguising one of my cousins as a girl I knew from "a school out of state."

That's great! All was swell until two weeks before prom when we broke up. Now the smart thing would have been to stay home. I think you all know me well enough by now to know that even at that age, I didn't always do the smart thing. I took my ex to the prom, where we spent all night ignoring each other. Oh the fun we had. I kept looking at the girl I wished I was there with and she stared at the floor wishing that she, I , or both of us were dead. To paraphrase supergroup Chicago, "color my world with pain and misery." The dance was followed by a party and a trip to the beach, where I downed as many 7-ounce Miller High Lifes as I could. In for a penny, in for a pound.

I'm glad the kids in New Orleans get to live out their dreams. Maybe they will create beautiful memories to last a lifetime. Don't count on it. Later...Brian