Prom Night

For Alex and her classmates, Senior Prom means a dinner-dance on January 16 at a semi -private restaurant in Antipolo. Originally built as a house, the restaurant is gated with a large veranda in front that offers a panoramic view of the night lights of Metro Manila. We gave gone through the usual dress and shoe shopping for the affair in one day as I certainly had no intention of stressing out over the whole thing like some families do as though the prom is some rite of passage for teenagers. It’s just a party where teenagers can have fun dressing up and acting all grown up. I thought I’d write about the experience and decided that it would be interesting to start with the origins of this very American high school tradition.

I typed “senior prom” as a keyphrase and searched Google. The first and second items on the search results page were both Wikipedia articles. The first was an article about the prom. “In the United States and Canada, a prom, short for promenade, is a formal (black tie) dance, or gathering of high school students.” No historical background. So I clicked the second link in the search results page.

Senior Prom is a still-classified United States Air Force program to develop a stealth unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for reconnaissance purposes (and possibly as a cruise missile), designed to be launched from a Lockheed DC-130, B-52 Stratofortress, or B-1 Lancer… Beginning in October 1978, six Senior Prom prototypes were launched from DC-130 carrier aircraft. Thirteen successful tests of Senior Prom were conducted over the Groom Lake air base in Nevada, proving undetectable to the SPS-13 RADAR. The program was ended in 1981, reportedly due to its size restricting its ability to be carried by a B-1 bomber…

Oh, boy. Wrong key phrase, obviously. I typed “prom night” instead and did another search. At the top of the search results page was the 1980 film Prom Night starring Jamie Lee Curtis. You know, the one where a mysterious killer chops off the heads of a few select high school seniors on prom night. I saw it when it was first shown in local movie houses, it wasn’t particularly good, my older daughter bought a DVD copy of the 2008 remake which, based on reviews, appears to be a hundred times worse than the original.

(As an aside, if you want a well-made horror flick set on prom night, try Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie starring a very young Sissy Spacek as a shy, introverted and often-bullied girl imbued with telekinetic powers. The senior prom is not exactly the main theme but it is the climax of the film. When Carrie suffers the final humiliation of becoming a laughingstock when she was drenched in pig’s blood after being crowned Prom Queen following a rigged balloting, Carrie uses her power to take her revenge. A classic horror film, really, but the novel is even better.)

So, anyway, I was searching for the history of the high school prom. Two searches so far and still nothing. I typed “origin high school prom” and hit jackpot. Originally, the prom was a college affair and a middle and upper class thing that was probably patterned after debutante’s balls. According to one web site:

The first reference to prom in popular history comes from the journal of an Amherst College student who described his invitation and attendance at an early prom at Smith College in 1894. While the writer used the word prom to describe the dance, it was likely just a fancy name for a customary senior-class ball held at the college. Prom, while important in the college setting, would fail to take on iconic status until it emerged in high schools.

The first high school proms were simple affairs where students danced and socialized at the bedecked school gym in their Sunday best. By the 1950′s, school gyms had become inadequate as proms had become more lavish affairs. Certain status symbols had become attached to the prom too – who had the best looking date, who wore the prettiest dress and who were popular enough to be chosen Prom King and Queen.

I’m looking at the timeline here, the Philippines was no longer an American colony in the 1950′s but, after over forty years of colonization and assimilation of the very pervasive American culture, it’s easy enough to understand why Filipinos embraced almost every American school tradition. The prom has been a prominent event in most private schools where students come from the upper and middle classes – complete with all the associated rituals, competitiveness and social status symbols.

So, I have an almost 16-year-old daughter who goes to one of those schools and they’re having their prom on Saturday. She actually thought it was silly and I couldn’t say that she was wrong. But it’s a school requirement so why not turn it into something entertaining? I want her to have fun so I encouraged her to treat the prom as a fun thing. I want her to feel confident (okay, smashing) s0 I spent never-mind-how-much on her dress, shoes and accessories. I want her to enjoy the night with a boy she is comfortable with so, needless to say, I did not encourage her to wait to be asked by some boy but, rather, to decide for herself who she wants to go with and ask him herself. Heck, this is 2010 after all and she has a right to choose for herself and even choose not to go with anybody. Breaking traditions can be a good thing as a way of showing that one isn’t a zombie that merely goes with the flow.

Will prom night turn out to be a memorable experience for her? I think so. She’s girly enough to feel excited now that she has all the right props.