I didn't go to Prom

Written for "Prom Night," Madbar, Chicago, June 2000.

I didn't go to prom. I was opposed to the corporate consumerist conspiracy in this country that manages to convince millions of otherwise rational teenagers to spend several hundred dollars on a limo to take them on a ten mile trip, on a prom dress they're just going to puke on anyway, on tickets to get into a Holiday Inn banquet hall festooned with crepe paper and white balloons and some lecherous burnt-out 36 year old DJ who still plays the Time Warp even though you begged him not to, you pleaded with him not to, and overcooked, dry chicken dinners and assistant principals who still won't let you touch your date's ass, for fuck's sake, and drunk jocks wearing their bow ties around their foreheads, "Night Ranger? Dude, I fuckin' love Night Ranger," automatic suspension for any student found to have rented a hotel room, furtive dark glances across the room from one wallflower to another wallflower, both dateless and alone and afraid because they're in high school and it's your job in high school to be dateless and alone and afraid, this forced jocularity about prom that's shoved down your throat on a daily basis for nine fuckin' months, New Year's and DisneyLand and a trip to a whorehouse all wrapped up in a green taffita nightmare, lukewarm peach wine coolers in the back parking lot of the Highway 94 Wal-Mart supercenter, choking back the bile with each sip because they're peach wine coolers and no one in the history of time has ever drank a peach wine cooler by choice except for a limo full of high school students on prom night, and you don't even have sex on prom night, or you do have sex but you're too drunk to remember it, or you do have sex but it's because you were date raped, or you do have sex but your date throws up on your tux in the middle of it, and it's 15 years later and you look back on the debacle of the whole evening and you wonder if this is what your mom meant when she said it was going to be the most important night of your life. So no, I didn't go to prom. In other words, I couldn't find a date.

Copyright 2000, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.