tonto_goldberg:Still, there's a whole bunch of magazines hoping that "Your Prom" is truly a life-or-death matter. There are dresses to be sold, tuxedos and limos to be rented, acne cream and hair products to be slathered about, legs (and more) to be shaved or waxed, shoes to hurt young women's feet, and who knows what else at stake.
In that sense, prom is a rehearsal for one's eventual wedding, ergo, we gotta nab 'em early and drill home the importance of overpaying for attire, flowers, food and entertainment. Some prom girls even wear tiaras. Because as everyone knows, a young girl's mission in life has to be to look like a princess, so she can snag a man. One can never start too early with princess-like behavior. Indeed, if one waits until 18 years old to begin, it may already be too late!
Maybe more kids these days have adopted LW's attitude towards prom . .ie, it doesn't really beat an evening spent with Facebook or eating pizza with friends. While I deride the increasing casualness of our society in general, I think this is a more realistic attitude. Prom is an artificially adult occasion foisted on an age group that really isn't accustomed to getting all dressed up and making small talk over punch all night. 16-18 year olds are pressured to assume behaviors on that night that are more in the realm of the 20-somethings . . .mostly all on their parents' dime. The concept of prom is all very Fitzgerald . . .but do kids really want that stuff anymore?
When I was in high school in the 1980s, at my huge, middle-class school, prom was a huge fat, hairy deal. The hugest. It was practically a suicide-worthy offense not to get invited to prom. The irony was that our prom was held in our high school cafeteria. So people dropped a few hundred bucks, minimum, to get all gussied up to dance in the place where they ate lunch every day. The place still reeked of mashed potatoes and overcooked vegetables, and the cheesy handpainted decorations by the junior class didn't do a thing to disguise the smell. Big whoop. It was hardly a "Pretty in Pink" scenario at a ritzy big-city hotel. Hardly! But the entire worth of your high school experience was somehow predicated on whether you got asked to this cheesy dance and therefore had the opportunity to wheedle your mom into spending a pile on a dress and your hair appointment. Or, if you had a part-time job, practically all your yearly earnings went toward prom expenditures. You were practically deemed a social leper if you didn't go. All to party in the cafeteria. Like LW, I saw very little point in attending prom, when I could go to an amusement park for the day with half the money and 20 times the fun quotient.
