While I shared your goal, my mother got over-involved in the prom-dress shopping process. I ended up in this horrendous emerald green satin column of drapery: picture the Statue of Liberty in something strapless. Not one of my finest moments.
We had a Junior/Senior dance. The local townie parents who infused the PTA wanted to have a prom, but the Board of Trustees was a little bit reluctant.
You laugh, but I think I actually do have one packed away somewhere. (I wanted to make some comment about how it was big on top (as I don't have breasts), but I realized I don't really know how cup size correlates to dress size correlates to chest breadth, and so on. Ah well. Imagine a funny.)
My prom fell between the eclipse of Grunge and the morning of High Irony, so one either did not attend out of a sense of angsty obligation or one went to Luby's Cafeteria before the dance. But 1998 presented a liminal moment, a sliver of opportunity my date and I captured: we had Italian beforehand and went to a jazz club after the dance.
Formal dances (even Proms) were no big deal at my school because there were so many of them. Since the boys' schools and girls' schools all had their own, you could easily end up going to 3 proms in a year so it didn't have that "our one special night" aspect that you see in the movies. By the time my Senior year rolled around, I was so sick of proms that I skipped my own and spent the weekend at OSU with some friends who had graduated the year before instead. The girl school proms were always fussy affairs and boring anyway, with the nuns enforcing proper attire and decorum. The boy school proms were where the fun was had -- they always had great music and their parties had the welcome tendency to get out of hand.
(I was in HS a couple of years before Armsmasher, during the tail end of the Grunge era. We didn't skip our proms out of angsty obligation but we did wear Converse high-tops or Doc Martens with our dresses to at least one prom in a foreshadowing of excruciatingly ironic era to come.)
I went to the Junior Prom when I was a sophomore, and a local family who had a house on an island in the bay opened it up to all of us, and chartered a ferry for us, I suppose to keep us all from driving drunk. It was my first serious experiment with alcohol and was pretty disastrous; the following week in school juniors who I didn't really know and didn't remember from the party would see me in the halls and say, "I'm glad you're okay." Ugh.
The coolest thing is going to prom with the girl you've been wanting to break up with for like a month, but you don't want to ruin her senior prom.
Then you have to strategize it afterward -- obviously, not the day after, but maybe a week? Two weeks? (This relationship had been going on for over a year.)
Now that I think about it, it was several months after the prom that I broke up with her. I mean, it's not like you're going to meet someone new during the summer.
Prom was pretty uneventful, except afterward, when we'd all gone to a friend's house, and chickie and I got a chance to steal way, old buddy and sometime commenter Kitty Darfour decided he'd come along, and took the top bunk, drunkenly narrating the sounds coming from the bottom bunk.
I boycotted my senior prom, largely because I didn't feel like trying to get anyone to go with me. (I wasn't in favor of proms, but I wasn't against them either.) At first I thought that the cool move was to pretend that I was boycotting for moral reasons, rather than out of sheer lameness. Then I decided that the ubercool move was to tell people I was boycotting out of sheer lameness, but have them suspect that I was secretly pocketing some moral objection that I considered them too simple to fully grasp.
It actually worked better than I expected. People would ask why I wasn't going, I would tell them it was because I didn't have a date, and then they would proceed to make arguments about how it would be stupid to miss out on a good time just on behalf of some principle.
I'm kind of glad I went to a private high school. I'm guessing that at a public high school, an attitude of intellectual condescension, absent any record of success with girls, is not enough to allow one to build up any social capital.
19/21: I went three times. Sophomore year, a friend asked me. She apparently liked me, until I liked her back. It was awkward, especially since I was younger than anyone else in the group, and was ignored the whole night. Junior year was uneventful (went with a friend I never even thought of hooking up with). Senior year I went with my on again/off again long-distance girlfriend, and the night before she told me we were off again for good. So prom in general sucked, until college Senior Prom, which was awesome because a) free booze, b) went with tweedlegirl and my family and c) free booze. Also cheese fries afterward from Hoagie Haven. Mmmm... hoagie haven.
Utopia Parkway came out too late for me, but I remember trying to convince my sister to lobby for "Prom Theme" to be her prom theme. I don't think she understood just how great that would have been (or perhaps it couldn't compete with the sheer inventiveness of "Some Enchanted Evening" or "Under the Sea" or whatever bullshit they ended up with).
I didn't go to my own prom, but had gone the year before. In retrospect the whole institution strikes me as kind of sad -- like we're making sure children have a chance to play romantic make believe before the grim truths of the real world set in.
Since I went to an all-girls school, I had to ask out my prom date. For my Junior Prom, the first guy I asked, Nick, (my best friend at the time) couldn't go because he was had a family event he couldn't miss that he described as a "moral obligation". I ended up asking this guy, Matt, that I had a crush on instead and the conversation went like this:
Me: So, um, do you want to go to Prom?
Matt: Why aren't you going with Nick? I figured you two would go together.
Me: Nick can't go. He has a "moral obligation".
Matt: Well, I don't have any morals so I'd be glad to go.
Worked out great -- it was the most fun I had at any HS dance and we ended up going out for a while.
My sister finished school in England. They didn't have a prom, but they did have a leavers' ball. They don't have a graduation--no diplomas are handed out--but there were prizes and a showcase of artwork and some plays.
The leavers' ball was nice, because there were teachers and parents there too, and since the drinking age in the UK is 18, there was a nice bubbly wine on offer too.
My junior prom is better not spoken of (especially the part where my date said, "Yeah, I'm just... gonna go home with my friends...") except for the karaoke rendition of Frosty the Snowman that my friends and I performed at the after-prom. (Hey, you think maybe that's why she left?)
My senior prom I went with my girlfriend who was way too hot for me. She was a good sport about the prom, considering she showed up in a fabulous slinky little dress and I was wearing a tux from the waist up, but with black shorts and mis-matched Converse All-Stars.
I never paid any attention to the proms in high school so I didn't even know when they were. My junior year I was in a class where everyone else was a senior and I only realized that they'd had their prom when the teacher, who was a chaperone, started class one Monday saying: "What happened last weekend was a disgrace."
Apparently some guy had been taken away in an ambulance with a blood alcohol ratio that nearly reached his GPA, and there was some incident involving arms and a sunroof. Sounded like good times.
I'm guessing that at a public high school, an attitude of intellectual condescension, absent any record of success with girls, is not enough to allow one to build up any social capital.
I can say--from observation mind you, and not experience, 'cuz I've always had mad game--that your guess is correct.
I broke up with my girlfriend something like a week or two before prom. It kind of sucked.
I broke up with my girlfriend during junior prom. It really sucked. On the other hand, the last time I saw her, she was working at WalMart, so that's nice.
My school's class of '99, like, I assume, all classes of '99 everywhere, used "Party Like It's 1999" as our theme song.
Meanwhile, my friends and I, being unpopular, styled ourselves somehow too hip and cool for the standard scene of decamping post-prom to a mansion in the Hamptons to party so decided instead to party in a lavish Upper West Side apartment which one of our friends' parents thoughtfully agreed to vacate in favor of a trip to their house in the Hamptons. At the time, we regarded this as some kind of bold rejection of the school's dominant overclass values, but in retrospect it's hard to see how that interpretation had any validity.
The whole thing turned out to be a disaster for a variety of reasons, including the fact that our usual coke dealer was oversubscribed because there were too many private school proms that weekend and we had to get some stuff of questionable quality from the barback at this one sake joint in the Village that took our limo way out of our way.
A large chunk of my high school converged on going to one of the trashier parts of the Jersey shore, Seaside Heights, post-prom. The particular group I was with was forced by our parents, due to fears of drunk driving, to charter a bus there and back. My date and I were having problems prior to prom, and prom clearly exacerbated them (typical story where I was more interested in a girl who was good friends with me than I was in the girl I was hooking up with). Everything else I could say about is even less interesting than the above, though I should note that my memories of prom are generally positive and this comment is more indicative of my mood today than my feelings about prom.
34, indeed it isn't -- that's why the night will always be special in my eyes. That and the tragic unraveling of the school's oh-so-hip lesbian couple.
35, you have to understand that we weren't the least popular kids in school. We mercilessly repressed the true underclass in order to make ourselves feel better and did our damndest to consume more intoxicating substances than the cool kids in order to make it clear that "really" we were better than them and not at all jealous. In retrospect, I was a real ass.
As someone who, apparently, cares more about Wehttam Saiselgy's career than he does, I request that he not be allowed to make any references to past drug use until he acquires a less traceable pseudonym. Barring that, I sugest that he limit himself to self-deprecating accounts of trying to smoke marajuana out of pop can during high school field trips. Anything beyond that threatens to encroach on Alameida's territory.
47: "Upon reflection" indeed. Standpipe, let's go somewhere far far away from these cruel people. Or we could just stick around and mock Ogged about something or other.
pjs makes a fair point. God willing, at some point, the Reds will want a piece of WS; why make it easy and printable? I say all references should be redacted.
Adam Kotsko wrote: "In the radical leftist circles he runs in, wouldn't drug use be considered a virtue?"
In those circles, yes. But how is he going to fulfill my dream for him of becoming Chelsea Clinton's Sid Blumenthal with all these indiscrete blog comments floating around?
With regard to 43, it should be said that in the world of Manhattan private girls schools, N-B had a bad reputatio" at least in my day compared to Chapin and Brearley. Those girls may probably didn't get kicked out as rapidly as the Nightingale ones.
Chapin girls were a bit better. Still, though the New Yorkers "partied" much harder than the typical New Englander. Nobody really partied--more like smoking in the woods, drinking and drugs were doe quietly in dorm rooms, although the two guys who got in trouble for acid use were definitely New Yorkers.
I did not frequent among those people. I was just an intellectual nerd. I didn't have the money for illicit substances. I had to budget for the occasional pizza, and I couldn't risk disappointing anyone by getting kicked out. I wasn't about to sneak out of my dorm room after check-in much less drink.
Apparently Mecca Cola donates 10% of their profits to "associations who work towards peace in the world and especially for peace in the conflict between Palestinians and fascist Zionist apartheid".
Little Miss Illinois Wannabee of the non-jiggly thighs accepted an invitation to Prom from an older flame even though we were supposedly "going out." She said she still "liked me" but had to honor her commitment to "older flame." That was the first hint I got that dating a beauty queen might be, well, challenging.
I went to prom with a friend and we had a nice time, which was probably all for the best. My only embarrassing memory is a picture of me in my yellow tux. Yes, yellow. Back then it was tres kewl to match your date's dress.
pjs, In my previous comment, I was actually considering a remark about how anti-Catholicism might come back in style -- in fact, I typed it, then erased it. So in a sense, I've been pwned.
I more-or-less cleaned up my act after I got to college, since Harvard is just full of dorks anyway there was no point in trying to be fun. Most all the drug use going down there was either pot (lame) or else aderol/ritalin for academic purposes; even one professor told me he was using the ADD drugs to try and get some shit published before his tenure review.
Buying the tux seems to make a lot of sense financially. On the other hand, if you buy a tux when you're 19 the only real result in practice is that you get to have that horrible moment when you realize you don't fit into your old tux anymore at the young age of 23. The upside is that I can tie a real bowtie, a true lost art.
Like Wehttam says, and it even gets worse as you age. Even if I could fit into my prom tux it is gonna be awhile before yellow is back to tres kewl, unless I get a job as a cheap gameshow host.
Re 74. I talked once to a guy whose brother had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He was sort of opening up to me at the time, and we were talking about psychotropic meds and psychiatry and the American health care system. (Mental illness in the family turns even certain Republicans into advocates of a much expanded health care safety net. He was scared of the NHS, because somebody he knew had cardiac troubles, and the doctors said, "Hmm, that is an odd result, but you're young let's just wait and see.")
Anyway, he mentioned Ritalin and said that when he tried it, it just put him to sleep. I then told him that it was probably a bad idea to mess with a stimulant if his brother had been manic and violent when anti-depressants were prescribed.
Re 79. A yellow tux is always a bad idea. Actually tuxedoes aren't even really formal wear, just what people in the 30's used to wear to dinner. White tie and tails are formal.
Saiselgy, the musicians in the orchestra had to wear their tuxes all the time.
In Australia we just don't seem to have quite so many formal evenings. My school and the other schools in our rural town did have a graduation ball though.
In NSW, instead of doing some standardised tests and then killing ourselves with extra-curricular activities trying to look well-rounded for our college applications, we all get selected for university based on adjusted performance in an immense number of written exams (I did about eighteen hours worth of them), ranked in a fashion which is comprehensible but so boring that it's not worth explaining. The upshot is that your school's opinion of you doesn't actually have a hell of a lot to do with whether or not you get your graduation certificate from the state education authorities. Therefore, the only mechanism by which the school can enforce dispiline over the Year 12 kids is by threatening not to allow them to go to the ball (which is held after exams, it's the last school event anyone attends).
My school was, as far as I can tell, completely barmy, and inhabited by barmy people. We were the only school I've ever heard of that had a debutante dress code for the graduation ball, that is, all the girls wore white or off-white floor length dresses. (And all the boys got a massive standard order rental.) Daring girls might have a slit or something. While there was one teacher in particular who would occasionally corner girls with spirit and tell them that all it would take would be one girl wearing red to break the tradition into the tiny little pieces it deserved. However, word used to get out, and said girls of daring would be quietly cornered by more conservative agressive girls and informed of the consequences of appearing in a non-standard colour. The standing argument about this was that it made the graduation photo look so nice. To the best of my knowledge, noone has broken ranks on this yet.
Wow ogged, that's a disturbing quick journey you made from my high school graduation to Mr Torvalds nearly as nature intended him. What did you pass through in between?
Tripp: no, the arrangement is much more boring. We're more or less arranged by height. I'm the girl at the furtherest back right: they put me there because I was taller than every boy in the photo except for perhaps two of them, and standing me right at the back where I belonged would have been weird.
The software was startled by your beauty.
Posted by Mike | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 7:59 AM
caused two business guys in suits to walk right into each other and both fall down on the street
Now that's a great moment. I don't think Labs has forgiven you yet, though.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 8:00 AM
While I shared your goal, my mother got over-involved in the prom-dress shopping process. I ended up in this horrendous emerald green satin column of drapery: picture the Statue of Liberty in something strapless. Not one of my finest moments.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 8:01 AM
Little black dresses are the tools of the devil. I have done more stupid things for those damn things than I care to remember.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 8:04 AM
We had a Junior/Senior dance. The local townie parents who infused the PTA wanted to have a prom, but the Board of Trustees was a little bit reluctant.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 8:07 AM
I have done more stupid things for those damn things than I care to remember.
How many do you have now? Can you still fit into any of them?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 8:32 AM
You laugh, but I think I actually do have one packed away somewhere. (I wanted to make some comment about how it was big on top (as I don't have breasts), but I realized I don't really know how cup size correlates to dress size correlates to chest breadth, and so on. Ah well. Imagine a funny.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 8:42 AM
My prom fell between the eclipse of Grunge and the morning of High Irony, so one either did not attend out of a sense of angsty obligation or one went to Luby's Cafeteria before the dance. But 1998 presented a liminal moment, a sliver of opportunity my date and I captured: we had Italian beforehand and went to a jazz club after the dance.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 8:43 AM
Luby's Cafeteria That's the detail that makes the story.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 8:47 AM
Little black dresses -- yes, I agree.
From a certain point of view, every stupid thing I've ever done has stemmed from a woman wearing a little black dress.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 8:57 AM
My grandparents used to take me to Luby's for my birthday, when I was in my single-digit years.
What is it about little black dresses?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 9:20 AM
I got as far as "my goal at my prom was to be wearing the skimpiest dress" before I realized Ogged didn't write this post.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 9:27 AM
I would have thought you'd be with me at least until the "two kids" part.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 9:29 AM
yeah, Ogged still hasn't recognized his illegitimate children. it's a dead giveaway.
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 9:40 AM
Formal dances (even Proms) were no big deal at my school because there were so many of them. Since the boys' schools and girls' schools all had their own, you could easily end up going to 3 proms in a year so it didn't have that "our one special night" aspect that you see in the movies. By the time my Senior year rolled around, I was so sick of proms that I skipped my own and spent the weekend at OSU with some friends who had graduated the year before instead. The girl school proms were always fussy affairs and boring anyway, with the nuns enforcing proper attire and decorum. The boy school proms were where the fun was had -- they always had great music and their parties had the welcome tendency to get out of hand.
(I was in HS a couple of years before Armsmasher, during the tail end of the Grunge era. We didn't skip our proms out of angsty obligation but we did wear Converse high-tops or Doc Martens with our dresses to at least one prom in a foreshadowing of excruciatingly ironic era to come.)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 9:52 AM
I went to the Junior Prom when I was a sophomore, and a local family who had a house on an island in the bay opened it up to all of us, and chartered a ferry for us, I suppose to keep us all from driving drunk. It was my first serious experiment with alcohol and was pretty disastrous; the following week in school juniors who I didn't really know and didn't remember from the party would see me in the halls and say, "I'm glad you're okay." Ugh.
Posted by Scheherazade | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 10:02 AM
The coolest thing is going to prom with the girl you've been wanting to break up with for like a month, but you don't want to ruin her senior prom.
Then you have to strategize it afterward -- obviously, not the day after, but maybe a week? Two weeks? (This relationship had been going on for over a year.)
Now that I think about it, it was several months after the prom that I broke up with her. I mean, it's not like you're going to meet someone new during the summer.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 10:17 AM
Prom was pretty uneventful, except afterward, when we'd all gone to a friend's house, and chickie and I got a chance to steal way, old buddy and sometime commenter Kitty Darfour decided he'd come along, and took the top bunk, drunkenly narrating the sounds coming from the bottom bunk.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 10:21 AM
17: I broke up with my girlfriend something like a week or two before prom. It kind of sucked.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 10:31 AM
I boycotted my senior prom, largely because I didn't feel like trying to get anyone to go with me. (I wasn't in favor of proms, but I wasn't against them either.) At first I thought that the cool move was to pretend that I was boycotting for moral reasons, rather than out of sheer lameness. Then I decided that the ubercool move was to tell people I was boycotting out of sheer lameness, but have them suspect that I was secretly pocketing some moral objection that I considered them too simple to fully grasp.
It actually worked better than I expected. People would ask why I wasn't going, I would tell them it was because I didn't have a date, and then they would proceed to make arguments about how it would be stupid to miss out on a good time just on behalf of some principle.
I'm kind of glad I went to a private high school. I'm guessing that at a public high school, an attitude of intellectual condescension, absent any record of success with girls, is not enough to allow one to build up any social capital.
Posted by pjs | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 10:44 AM
19: Me too. We went together anyways. Her new date was there when I picked her up and waiting afterwards, which I thought weird.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 10:48 AM
19/21: I went three times. Sophomore year, a friend asked me. She apparently liked me, until I liked her back. It was awkward, especially since I was younger than anyone else in the group, and was ignored the whole night. Junior year was uneventful (went with a friend I never even thought of hooking up with). Senior year I went with my on again/off again long-distance girlfriend, and the night before she told me we were off again for good. So prom in general sucked, until college Senior Prom, which was awesome because a) free booze, b) went with tweedlegirl and my family and c) free booze. Also cheese fries afterward from Hoagie Haven. Mmmm... hoagie haven.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 10:57 AM
Utopia Parkway came out too late for me, but I remember trying to convince my sister to lobby for "Prom Theme" to be her prom theme. I don't think she understood just how great that would have been (or perhaps it couldn't compete with the sheer inventiveness of "Some Enchanted Evening" or "Under the Sea" or whatever bullshit they ended up with).
I didn't go to my own prom, but had gone the year before. In retrospect the whole institution strikes me as kind of sad -- like we're making sure children have a chance to play romantic make believe before the grim truths of the real world set in.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 10:58 AM
Since I went to an all-girls school, I had to ask out my prom date. For my Junior Prom, the first guy I asked, Nick, (my best friend at the time) couldn't go because he was had a family event he couldn't miss that he described as a "moral obligation". I ended up asking this guy, Matt, that I had a crush on instead and the conversation went like this:
Me: So, um, do you want to go to Prom?
Matt: Why aren't you going with Nick? I figured you two would go together.
Me: Nick can't go. He has a "moral obligation".
Matt: Well, I don't have any morals so I'd be glad to go.
Worked out great -- it was the most fun I had at any HS dance and we ended up going out for a while.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 11:00 AM
My sister finished school in England. They didn't have a prom, but they did have a leavers' ball. They don't have a graduation--no diplomas are handed out--but there were prizes and a showcase of artwork and some plays.
The leavers' ball was nice, because there were teachers and parents there too, and since the drinking age in the UK is 18, there was a nice bubbly wine on offer too.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 11:02 AM
play romantic make believe before the grim truths of the real world set in.
Now that would make a great prom theme.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 11:13 AM
My junior prom is better not spoken of (especially the part where my date said, "Yeah, I'm just... gonna go home with my friends...") except for the karaoke rendition of Frosty the Snowman that my friends and I performed at the after-prom. (Hey, you think maybe that's why she left?)
My senior prom I went with my girlfriend who was way too hot for me. She was a good sport about the prom, considering she showed up in a fabulous slinky little dress and I was wearing a tux from the waist up, but with black shorts and mis-matched Converse All-Stars.
I was "alternative" and a "rebel," you see.
Posted by Matt #3 | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 11:22 AM
I never paid any attention to the proms in high school so I didn't even know when they were. My junior year I was in a class where everyone else was a senior and I only realized that they'd had their prom when the teacher, who was a chaperone, started class one Monday saying: "What happened last weekend was a disgrace."
Apparently some guy had been taken away in an ambulance with a blood alcohol ratio that nearly reached his GPA, and there was some incident involving arms and a sunroof. Sounded like good times.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 11:57 AM
I'm guessing that at a public high school, an attitude of intellectual condescension, absent any record of success with girls, is not enough to allow one to build up any social capital.
I can say--from observation mind you, and not experience, 'cuz I've always had mad game--that your guess is correct.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 12:06 PM
I broke up with my girlfriend something like a week or two before prom. It kind of sucked.
I broke up with my girlfriend during junior prom. It really sucked. On the other hand, the last time I saw her, she was working at WalMart, so that's nice.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 12:08 PM
Clearly her progress beyond low-level retail was stymied by the early emotional trauma at your hands, Chopper.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 12:46 PM
My school's class of '99, like, I assume, all classes of '99 everywhere, used "Party Like It's 1999" as our theme song.
Meanwhile, my friends and I, being unpopular, styled ourselves somehow too hip and cool for the standard scene of decamping post-prom to a mansion in the Hamptons to party so decided instead to party in a lavish Upper West Side apartment which one of our friends' parents thoughtfully agreed to vacate in favor of a trip to their house in the Hamptons. At the time, we regarded this as some kind of bold rejection of the school's dominant overclass values, but in retrospect it's hard to see how that interpretation had any validity.
The whole thing turned out to be a disaster for a variety of reasons, including the fact that our usual coke dealer was oversubscribed because there were too many private school proms that weekend and we had to get some stuff of questionable quality from the barback at this one sake joint in the Village that took our limo way out of our way.
Posted by Wehttam Saiselgy | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 1:36 PM
A large chunk of my high school converged on going to one of the trashier parts of the Jersey shore, Seaside Heights, post-prom. The particular group I was with was forced by our parents, due to fears of drunk driving, to charter a bus there and back. My date and I were having problems prior to prom, and prom clearly exacerbated them (typical story where I was more interested in a girl who was good friends with me than I was in the girl I was hooking up with). Everything else I could say about is even less interesting than the above, though I should note that my memories of prom are generally positive and this comment is more indicative of my mood today than my feelings about prom.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 1:54 PM
our usual coke dealer was oversubscribed
Now that's not something you hear every day.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 1:56 PM
NYC is the kind of place where even the unpopular high school kids have coke parties.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:02 PM
That's shockingly poor inventory management. I guess there are still opportunities to penetrate the NY high school coke market.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:04 PM
34, indeed it isn't -- that's why the night will always be special in my eyes. That and the tragic unraveling of the school's oh-so-hip lesbian couple.
Posted by Wehttam Saiselgy | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:07 PM
32,34, 35.
Wehttam, Is that something you want to admit to on a blog? This is the US, not the UK.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:07 PM
I was thinking the same thing, but hey, it's a pseudonym.
Actually, I was thinking, "I hope he doesn't plan on running for office."
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:08 PM
35, you have to understand that we weren't the least popular kids in school. We mercilessly repressed the true underclass in order to make ourselves feel better and did our damndest to consume more intoxicating substances than the cool kids in order to make it clear that "really" we were better than them and not at all jealous. In retrospect, I was a real ass.
Posted by Wehttam Saiselgy | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:09 PM
BG: IIRC, to admit to going to Dalton is to admit to the above.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:10 PM
As long as the lead investigator went to Harvard, they'll never figure out who he is.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:10 PM
SCMT--The New York kids at my school were the worst offenders. 3 of the girls who came from Nightingale-Bamford got kicked out.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:13 PM
As someone who, apparently, cares more about Wehttam Saiselgy's career than he does, I request that he not be allowed to make any references to past drug use until he acquires a less traceable pseudonym. Barring that, I sugest that he limit himself to self-deprecating accounts of trying to smoke marajuana out of pop can during high school field trips. Anything beyond that threatens to encroach on Alameida's territory.
Posted by pjs | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:13 PM
So far, all I've seen Wehttam do is admit that his spoiled teenage coterie had a personal soda pop supplier. What are the rest of you on about?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:17 PM
What kind of Coke do the Dalton kids drink?
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:20 PM
From ogged's link:
I don't know what "seman desrever" is, but it sounds dirty.
It sounded to me like the emergence from a week-long dream. Upon reflection, I probably went to Harvard.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:20 PM
In the radical leftist circles he runs in, wouldn't drug use be considered a virtue?
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:20 PM
I liked these days better. I hope baa's going to come in for it next time he shows his face.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:22 PM
46 ad 48: Maybe it was their personal supplier of Mecca Cola.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:23 PM
47: "Upon reflection" indeed. Standpipe, let's go somewhere far far away from these cruel people. Or we could just stick around and mock Ogged about something or other.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:23 PM
SCMT has this right in 41.
Posted by Wehttam Saiselgy | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:24 PM
pjs makes a fair point. God willing, at some point, the Reds will want a piece of WS; why make it easy and printable? I say all references should be redacted.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:25 PM
Adam Kotsko wrote: "In the radical leftist circles he runs in, wouldn't drug use be considered a virtue?"
In those circles, yes. But how is he going to fulfill my dream for him of becoming Chelsea Clinton's Sid Blumenthal with all these indiscrete blog comments floating around?
Posted by pjs | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:26 PM
People, let WS handle his own bidness.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:27 PM
Now y'all are being paranoid. If you think his wanton drinking of soda pop is going to hurt him, but his anti-Catholic rants aren't, well...
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:27 PM
If Mecca Cola is anything like Inca Cola, I think I just got diabetes from reading that.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:28 PM
With regard to 43, it should be said that in the world of Manhattan private girls schools, N-B had a bad reputatio" at least in my day compared to Chapin and Brearley. Those girls may probably didn't get kicked out as rapidly as the Nightingale ones.
Posted by Wehttam Saiselgy | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:29 PM
57: It's not.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:30 PM
Yeah, I don't really see a need for anymore self-censorship norms than the minimal semi-implicit ones already in place here.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:30 PM
upon reflection
Well, if you want mirror writing, you might want to check out Da Vinci's notebook here.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:35 PM
"anymore" s/b two words
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:40 PM
Chapin girls were a bit better. Still, though the New Yorkers "partied" much harder than the typical New Englander. Nobody really partied--more like smoking in the woods, drinking and drugs were doe quietly in dorm rooms, although the two guys who got in trouble for acid use were definitely New Yorkers.
I did not frequent among those people. I was just an intellectual nerd. I didn't have the money for illicit substances. I had to budget for the occasional pizza, and I couldn't risk disappointing anyone by getting kicked out. I wasn't about to sneak out of my dorm room after check-in much less drink.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:40 PM
Apparently Mecca Cola donates 10% of their profits to "associations who work towards peace in the world and especially for peace in the conflict between Palestinians and fascist Zionist apartheid".
Noble of them.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:41 PM
Saiselgy ably says Hazel's elegy.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:46 PM
The way that Zionism has worked out in practice has ended up looking eerily similar to an apartheid system. Not that it is, of course!
Yes, WS has already shot himself in the foot with his anti-Catholic bigotry -- let him run free (to the extent that he can run with a wounded foot).
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:46 PM
bg, this wasn't college, was it? I don't remember check-in times.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:51 PM
Little Miss Illinois Wannabee of the non-jiggly thighs accepted an invitation to Prom from an older flame even though we were supposedly "going out." She said she still "liked me" but had to honor her commitment to "older flame." That was the first hint I got that dating a beauty queen might be, well, challenging.
I went to prom with a friend and we had a nice time, which was probably all for the best. My only embarrassing memory is a picture of me in my yellow tux. Yes, yellow. Back then it was tres kewl to match your date's dress.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:51 PM
Or, for that matter, woods.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:51 PM
I was kind of hoping that by the time Chelsea Clinton is ready to run for president, anti-Catholicism will be fashionable again.
Posted by pjs | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:52 PM
re 67: No, boarding school, of course.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:53 PM
pjs, In my previous comment, I was actually considering a remark about how anti-Catholicism might come back in style -- in fact, I typed it, then erased it. So in a sense, I've been pwned.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:54 PM
Matt,
Or, for that matter, woods.
No, I don't recall matching her woods. We didn't really golf back then. It was an old man's sport.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:54 PM
I more-or-less cleaned up my act after I got to college, since Harvard is just full of dorks anyway there was no point in trying to be fun. Most all the drug use going down there was either pot (lame) or else aderol/ritalin for academic purposes; even one professor told me he was using the ADD drugs to try and get some shit published before his tenure review.
Posted by Wehttam Saiselgy | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:55 PM
My Dad disapproved of kids wearing tuxes. He thought that the boys should wear a nice suit to a dance.
I always thought it made a lot of sense for young men in college to buy a tux. If you wear one more than twice, it's cheaper than renting.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:56 PM
Adderall = magic happy pills
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:57 PM
Little black dresses are like the black velvet pedestles that hold up fine diamonds.
By themselves they aren't much of anything but with the gem . . . it will take your breath away.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:57 PM
Buying the tux seems to make a lot of sense financially. On the other hand, if you buy a tux when you're 19 the only real result in practice is that you get to have that horrible moment when you realize you don't fit into your old tux anymore at the young age of 23. The upside is that I can tie a real bowtie, a true lost art.
Posted by Wehttam Saiselgy | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 2:58 PM
Like Wehttam says, and it even gets worse as you age. Even if I could fit into my prom tux it is gonna be awhile before yellow is back to tres kewl, unless I get a job as a cheap gameshow host.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 3:00 PM
Re 74. I talked once to a guy whose brother had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He was sort of opening up to me at the time, and we were talking about psychotropic meds and psychiatry and the American health care system. (Mental illness in the family turns even certain Republicans into advocates of a much expanded health care safety net. He was scared of the NHS, because somebody he knew had cardiac troubles, and the doctors said, "Hmm, that is an odd result, but you're young let's just wait and see.")
Anyway, he mentioned Ritalin and said that when he tried it, it just put him to sleep. I then told him that it was probably a bad idea to mess with a stimulant if his brother had been manic and violent when anti-depressants were prescribed.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 3:02 PM
I used to be opposed to formal wear. I'm not pictured in my high school yearbook senior year because they wouldn't allow me to wear casual clothing.
I guess I'm the riffraff of this thread.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 3:04 PM
Re 79. A yellow tux is always a bad idea. Actually tuxedoes aren't even really formal wear, just what people in the 30's used to wear to dinner. White tie and tails are formal.
Saiselgy, the musicians in the orchestra had to wear their tuxes all the time.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 3:08 PM
Yeah, but for a while anything with a collar and buttons seemed formal to me.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 3:10 PM
In Australia we just don't seem to have quite so many formal evenings. My school and the other schools in our rural town did have a graduation ball though.
In NSW, instead of doing some standardised tests and then killing ourselves with extra-curricular activities trying to look well-rounded for our college applications, we all get selected for university based on adjusted performance in an immense number of written exams (I did about eighteen hours worth of them), ranked in a fashion which is comprehensible but so boring that it's not worth explaining. The upshot is that your school's opinion of you doesn't actually have a hell of a lot to do with whether or not you get your graduation certificate from the state education authorities. Therefore, the only mechanism by which the school can enforce dispiline over the Year 12 kids is by threatening not to allow them to go to the ball (which is held after exams, it's the last school event anyone attends).
My school was, as far as I can tell, completely barmy, and inhabited by barmy people. We were the only school I've ever heard of that had a debutante dress code for the graduation ball, that is, all the girls wore white or off-white floor length dresses. (And all the boys got a massive standard order rental.) Daring girls might have a slit or something. While there was one teacher in particular who would occasionally corner girls with spirit and tell them that all it would take would be one girl wearing red to break the tradition into the tiny little pieces it deserved. However, word used to get out, and said girls of daring would be quietly cornered by more conservative agressive girls and informed of the consequences of appearing in a non-standard colour. The standing argument about this was that it made the graduation photo look so nice. To the best of my knowledge, noone has broken ranks on this yet.
The photo in question is here.
Posted by Mary | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 6:39 PM
And the photo the world did not need to see is here.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 6:45 PM
Wow ogged, that's a disturbing quick journey you made from my high school graduation to Mr Torvalds nearly as nature intended him. What did you pass through in between?
Posted by Mary | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 6:49 PM
Most of Australia.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 6:50 PM
I'm pretty sure the proper response is, "All your base are belong to us, mate."
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10-17-05 7:28 PM
Mary,
Thanks for the photo! Wow. And I thought "Five Women Wearing the Same Dress" was a lot.
Did they intentionally put all the girls in strapless gowns in the back?
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10-18-05 7:59 AM
Tripp: no, the arrangement is much more boring. We're more or less arranged by height. I'm the girl at the furtherest back right: they put me there because I was taller than every boy in the photo except for perhaps two of them, and standing me right at the back where I belonged would have been weird.
Posted by Mary | Link to this comment | 10-18-05 3:24 PM
Cheez. If the moonies ever manage to convert an entire mormon high school, that's what the wedding will look like.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 10-18-05 3:35 PM