The prom thing

Saturday I was a prom dad. I'm not sure what this means in other households. Here, it means my wife runs around with my daughter getting her hair, makeup dress, whatever, while I buy whatever stuff is needed, move furniture, and arrange whatever I have been told to arrange. The apogee of manual labor. Also somewhere between being a 5th wheel and a spare tire.

The whole build-up to prom is excruciating. The dress, the hair, the flowers, the shoes. All of my favorite things wrapped up into one event. Fortunately, my exalted position as prom dad keeps all that stuff safely away from me. This is good because proms in general are pretty foreign to me. When I was a senior in high school, I'd guess a quarter of the kids went to the prom. I never even really thought about going. Of course I was also an outsider and kind of a nerd, but none of my friends went, even the ones with girlfriends.

So I guess, the more things change the more they stay the same. Except now I have to devote hours to something that I'm not really involved with. This included chaperoning post-prom. As part of the Global War On Fun (tm), it is now necessary to contain high school students both before and after prom in order to prevent them from doing the kinds of things they routinely do on Saturday nights. So not only is prom night special because of prom itself, but it's the only Saturday night you don't drink or smoke weed or sit in your room playing Bioshock with your friends.

In real life, this means keeping them cooped up from an hour before the prom until 5AM, when they are presumably too tired to get into much trouble, and they are also allowed to drive with their junior licenses. The cooping, at least for my kid's school, is done at the Plymouth Township Community Center, which was done up by a dedicated group of volunteers (of which I was not one) to look as much like a beach shack in Maui as a 3-story stone and glass community center can on a budget of under $500.

So my job was to roam around the tropical paradise (better soft pretzels than in actual Hawaii!) from 2-5AM and make sure the kids weren't doing anything antisocial, or overly social, I suppose. There was some mess-making and some kids lying on each other, but more of them were hanging out, talking and, ultimately, sleeping. Time passed slowly, especially because one of the other parents would announce every minute, "74 minutes to go!" until it actually was time to go.

And then it was over. 6AM bedtime. And the end of promming for me.