It was my first year as Principal of Meadowbrook High. Last year I had been Acting so made no attempt to alter the “script”. Last year, at the first Staff meeting on return from Easter Break,  the topic was “THE PROM”.

I turned deliberations over to the Vice Principal and reported to my Office to be sick. Prom, the very word, was up there with Holocaust and Armageddon as events I did not want to contemplate.

Oh, I will never forget my High School Prom.

It began the year I was a junior and my best friend, Di, was a senior. At Easter break she became All Prom All The Time.

What she would wear, how she would do her hair, even the color of her nail polish. No military campaign had ever been planned with more thoroughness than Di planned her advent at THE PROM. She had been going with Mac for nearly a year, the question of escort need not be asked.

Vicariously, I lived her Prom, thinking how wonderful it would be, resolving that as a senior, from day one, I would find a boyfriend so there would be no question as to whom was taking me to the Prom. For the entire month of September, I hunted the corridors to find a boy who could take me to the Prom. As my grades began to slip I buckled down, telling myself I was being too anxious, I had plenty of time.

Until Easter Break when I still had not a single date, nor a single boy who had tried to talk to me beyond; “What’s the answer to question two?”

I realized then I wasn’t going to the Prom.

By June, the mention of the word would bring tears to my eyes. I had a circle of “reject” friends who were also not going and though one suggested we do something on Prom Night, Teresa dismissed that idea as pathetic. “We’re all on the train going to Spinster City, let’s not fool ourselves. Let’s concentrate on being successful in college so we can have a very comfortable Old Age.”

This is not what a seventeen year old want to hear.

On Prom night I stayed home and watched the old flick, “Marty“, principally that scene where the female lead sits in the living room with her parents watching a comedy on television and crying.

College wasn’t much better, and if there was a “Prom” I don’t know about it. With my lowered expectations, I met and married Ed.