Skipping Prom Night Means Dancing to Another Tune

When I was in high school, this was the Season of Dread. That followed the Season of Tension, which followed the Season of Disorientation, which followed the Season of Haplessness, which followed the Season of Self-Loathing.

Considering that all those seasons were crammed into the second semester of my senior year, you see why high school was a wobbly time for me.

The Season of Dread commenced with the first announcement about the Senior Prom. Normal students met the news with much tittering and expectant joy. It meant the school year was about over, but it also signaled the approach of the one night when we’d be turned loose on the streets to revel with abandon.

If you weren’t looking forward to Prom Night, it meant only one thing: You couldn’t get a date. Not only that, it meant you couldn’t get a date on the biggest date night of the year, when even the dorkiest guy in school could find somebody to pin a corsage on.

Nobody stayed home on Prom Night.

I remember sitting in the Omaha Benson High auditorium on the morning the Season of Dread began. We had about 700 students in the senior class, and I can still hear the waves of applause and whoops of delight that followed the announcement that the Left Banke, a nationally known rock band that had the hit, “Walk Away, Renee,” had agreed to play for the prom, which was still several weeks away.

Everyone was thrilled. I joined in with feigned glee that we were getting such a big-time band but secretly wondered how I was going to explain away skipping such a major event.

But skip it, I would. And for the next several weeks, as everyone else’s excitement level mounted, I dreaded Prom Night.

Oh, the thought of getting a date was out of the question. Never even considered it. Sure, I’m a cool guy now, but as a 16-year-old senior (my parents had long since wished they’d held me back a year), I was socially retarded, to say the least. My sexual history consisted of being kissed on the head when I was 10 by a girl I then beat up.

But more to the point, I didn’t consider getting a date because a) I didn’t know how to drive and b) The only guy I knew who did drive was an even bigger geek and couldn’t get a date, either, and c) I didn’t know any girls.

As embarrassing as it was that my classmates knew I wasn’t going to the prom, I felt worse for my parents. They saw me in my room every Friday and Saturday night, listening to the radio and staring into space.

“Not going out this weekend?” Mom or Dad would say.

After about two years of “No, not this week,” I think they started getting the message.

They probably wished I’d known a Hells Angel. Or, at least someone who got a B. Instead, my one pal was a guy who drove with both hands on the wheel, played Stratego all the time and talked about going to Dartmouth.

So, although my parents knew I was sluggish socially, I was determined that they not find out I wasn’t going to the prom. Alas, my sister blabbed in midweek that it was coming up that Saturday night.

“You’re not going to the prom?” Mom asked.

It was a plaintive query, tinged with faint hope. I just shrugged, which was my chief form of communication in those days, and sidled off.

I still remember that Saturday night. Hour upon hour of watching the clock inch around the dial, wishing the night would end. My parents were too thoughtful to push the issue, so they stayed in the living room while I spent the evening holed up in my room.

In later years, I wondered whether they secretly wished that, just once, the police had brought me home one night. Or that they’d found a cigarette butt in my lunch pail. Who knows, perhaps I could have spared them much worry by coming home one night with a trace of beer on my breath. Dad would have said: Son, don’t ever drink again, but thank you, thank you, for doing it just this one time! You’ve made your mother and me so happy.

But I never did. I continued for some time along the wallflower’s path, not flowering until my early 20s (all right, early 30s) into the enviable model of social gracefulness that I exhibit today.

Funny how things turn out. The Left Banke canceled its prom appearance that spring, and Omaha’s own Chevrons played in its place. After all that worry, what did I really miss, huh?

So, I speak today to all those teens who stayed home on Prom Night this year. Or, who aren’t going anywhere on Grad Night.

Take heart, kids. Maybe you won’t miss all that much. And remember, you can still turn out to be just like me.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.