Teenage Angst

I was killing time on the New York Times website today when I came across an editorial collection discussing whether or not prom should be abolished, given that it has become an evening of excess of just about every sort for hormone-driven teenagers who have not fully developed the capacity for good judgment yet. I'm not criticizing them for it... it's just true that the brain doesn't mature until about the age of 26!

Well, I'm one of the abstainers who didn't go to prom when my day came. As I remember it, in the days leading up to the prom, one young man who was a friend of mine asked me to go as his date. I remember feeling terribly uncomfortable with the whole idea, in part because my parents, possibly in the spirit of the "you can date when you are 35" exaggerated rules they repeated ad nauseam, had said that if a nice young man from Whittier Christian invited me to his senior banquet, then I might be able to consider going... but a prom at my public school? No way, Jose! In fact, just as I managed a date or three before I was 35, when it comes right down to it, my parents may have let me go.

In the end, it wasn't up to them. I declined, and not for the superficial reasons most people probably assumed. My would-be date had what might be called a weight problem; that I could get over, even though I had yet to develop one myself. What I couldn't get over was his volatile temper. I had visions of being in some fabled prom-night situation I didn't want to be in with a date who had a tendency to become explosively angry when crossed. Suddenly the prospect of staying home seemed more appealing than any princess dress, wilted corsage, crowded limo and gaudy hairdo.

My fate was sealed after talking to my mom about the refusal. Mom made a case for putting the feelings of others above my own convenience, which, in this situation, meant that if I had already broken one heart, I didn't need to pour salt in the wound by accepting another. While I am not sure if that is a realistic value to cling to in the real post-high school world, it had its merits in that moment. You see, most of the guys who found me attractive had serious problems, and the upshot of accepting that premise was that I was safe at home while my classmates were up to all manner of nonsense. I simply made it clear that I didn't plan to attend and avoided any need for further refusals.

My, oh, my... yes, there were some doozies among my high school admirers. On the short list of other potential prom dates were the nearly toothless and positively reeking skinny kid who lived in a flea motel and could be found urinating on the railroad tracks in broad daylight, and there was the dark-haired awkward guy who had trouble stringing words together sufficient to communicate is intention to kill himself if I didn't reconsider returning his regard. I suppose I should feel fortunate to have been found desirable at all in that most awkward of barely post-braces life phases, but when the ones who liked me were the broken and the outcast, there sure was a lot of pressure and not a lot of promise. I was not about to take more responsibility for the continued life of the one, and my compassion was not deep enough to overlook the abject poverty and lack of social graces of the other.

There you have it. No prom for me.

I don't regret it for a second. I never have. My only potential prom-related regrets were that the dreamboat dates I would have liked to have snagged had their sites trained on other heights... but that is another story altogether.

Do I think prom should be abolished? Sure. It would have spared me having to refuse my friend and would have saved plenty of my high school acquantainces the indignity of those old early-90s prom photos with dates they would rather forget... not to mention lots of money.

Far from thinking abolishing prom is a bad idea, I would suggest that stopping with prom would be a mistake. Why not abolish high school? For that matter, why not abolish the years between the onset of puberty and the development of the frontal lobes entirely? That, my friends, would save us all a host of indignities!

Perhaps I am just jaded by my lack of prom memories. Perhaps it is all sour grapes for me. I don't know. I'm willing to entertain the idea that I just don't know the magic I missed.

I do know that I finally got my princess dress at my wedding, and eventually snagged my dreamboat and danced with him and carried a huge bouquet and ate dinner surrounded by people I actually liked! Only that party wasn't about vying to be king and queen of fickle teenage popularity: we were the ones with the crowns for the day - no questions asked!

Interestingly enough, this happened the year after my frontal lobes should have peaked, so you might call it one of my first exercises of my full capacity for judgment. I can't help but think, however, that at least some of the right synapses got firing around prom-time after all.

Yeah... you can have prom if you want it. I'll take a good book in my hair-band-poster-plastered disaster area of a bedroom and any other escape you may want to offer me from the foolishness that is teenage life. And for those of you still waiting for those lobes to come ripe... I wish you all the best, and I don't envy you a jot!