In Brooklyn, in the seventies at least, we did not do proms, or homecomings, or turnabout dances. We endured the perils of public high school, rewarded, if we scored well enough on tests, with a shorter stay and jettisoned out of the neurotic comfort of our overcrowded schools and cramped apartments way too early, certainly before we had sufficient time to contemplate the winding down of our adolescence. Too young to drink, too young to get our driver's licenses, unaware that most of the country didn't grow up as we did, we took our thick Brooklyn accents on the road and somehow ventured from Point A to Point B without jumping through all the requisite hoops off passage. Rites and rights. Like prom, for example.
Last night, at the very tender age of fifty-three and a half, I attended my first high school prom. Relegated with faculty and other "old folks" to discreet tables in the back corners, I was little more than the wall flower I assume I would have been back in the day. Less even. Not so much a wall flower as a fly on the wall. I watched, invisible in my plain black dress, as teens in a rainbow of chiffon dresses and polyester tuxedo vests clung to each other for dear life on the dance floor, that last square of solid ground beneath their feet before they fly off on their own. I could not help but wonder who among them would underachieve, or maybe overachieve, or maybe simply achieve what is expected of them. By somebody other than themselves.
In large numbers, they looked formidable, confident, secure. As terrified as they may be now of what awaits them in the fall, many of the girls will soon bask in the temporary glow of being -- and pardon me if this sounds crass -- fresh meat for bored college upperclassmen. The boys, many of them anyway, will no longer be big men on campus as they get shoved down, once again, to the bottom of the heap in life's game of Chutes and Ladders by guys with far more chest hair and the capacity to grow a full beard. As grown up as they seem now, they will once again look like little boys, at least for a time.
One girl stood out from the rest. Not the prettiest, though certainly pretty (to me at least) as they all are in that fresh faced youthful way. She was a little overweight, and moved within a small circle of other girls. When the music slowed, she stood off to the side, laughing with her friends while other girls stood on tip toe and threw their arms around the necks of their lanky dates. Her dress was white, and it blinked on and off like a Christmas tree. I had to look a few times to make sure, but yes, her dress was actually flickering. I made my way over to her during one of the slow dances and asked her how she got her dress to light up that way. She had sewn the lights into the seams herself. Her smile was as bright as the glow sticks woven into her gown. My guess was she already knew what it felt like to not cling to the larger group, on the dance floor or anywhere. Her independence and ingenuity would serve her well. I told her she looked beautiful, and I meant it. I felt confident she would always remember that dress, that prom.
I left long before the lights flickered and the dance floor emptied. But I left realizing I had missed out on something all those years ago, the closest thing to a moment that would mark the passing from one phase of life into another. As I told my daughter the other day, arrivals and departures are important to me; they are the moments between phases, the identifiable points in time that make endings and new beginnings official. Once the bobby pins are pulled out of the hair and the tuxedo pants are stuffed back into plastic bags, these kids will remember the moment that was their senior prom.
As for me, I can't go back. The best I can do is to keep dancing, moment to moment.
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