So let's crush that fly

My prom sucked: Not just my experience at the prom, but, really, the whole thing. The junior class throws the prom for the senior class ahead of them. If you have an eager, motivated bunch, you end up with a nice prom, like the one in any number of teen movies. If you have a bunch of gen y slacks, you get “One Night in Paris,” replete with shitty cardboard reproduction of the Eiffel Tower and bad pastries, hosted at the Colorado Art Institute because the juniors waited too long to book and all of the hotel ballrooms were taken.

The guy I had secretly hoped to go with was going with another girl, one who had been a friend and then, in the way of high school girls, abruptly stopped. The two groups of single people I tried to glom onto managed to shake me, so I ended up going alone in my mom’s 1991 Toyota Camry. I stayed about two hours: long enough to make the rounds, find someone in my exact same dress (a trashy, awful girl who brought her 35 year old husband as her date), receive no compliments on my homemade handbag and wrap, and be asked to dance zero times.

I had always equated prom with magic (common theme in my early life and this from a non-Catholic). There was this expectation, from all of those stupid 80s movies, that prom somehow fixed everything that had gone wrong in high school. Couples that were meant to be somehow found each other on prom night. Bad people were punished. The punishment could be innocuous, like public embarrassment and a food fight (a la Valley Girl), or death (a la Carrie). I wandered around my prom waiting for this whirling of the cosmos to happen, but it didn’t. I was home by 10:30 PM.

This year I turn 30, and I thought it might be fun to host a prom for my birthday. I was going to sell tickets (for a great dinner, of course) and hire a DJ and make everyone wear prom dresses and spike the punch and all of those goofy things associated with prom, but the more I thought about it, though, the more I feared I was still looking for this prom miracle. I would go through all of this trouble and expense of throwing this prom, and in the end, I would be out in the parking lot waiting for Andrew McCarthy (except not, cause no...maybe Jake Ryan instead). I would just be disappointed again.

So instead, I am going to NYC with my sister for 3 days. I plan to eat at great restaurants and see a show and not throw a prom. This solution helps me meet one of my new year’s resolutions as well. I have a problem saying no. Instead of saying no, I’ll do things for people and then resent the shit out of them. This way, I get a trip instead of the logistical headache of party planning. Yay for New York.

In other news, I love Vanity Fair. I'm about half way through, and I'm beginning to see why people didn't like the movie.