Magic Moments : The Co-Ed Winter Formal and Other Dramas Unfold
Smells like teen formal.
Gardenia corsages perfume the air at La Quinta High School’s winter dance, where other timeless traditions cling to this, the Academy Awards of teendom dress-up.
But slow dancing and staying out too late and other rites of passage coexist with new twists. Kids have sneaked booze into the hop since Eisenhower was President, but when did they get threatened with a Breathalyzer at the door? What used to be the quintessential date night now finds a platonic party of 32 chartering a bus as its chariot. Do you buy your own corsage for that?
Here in Newport Beach’s Plaza of the Flags, a food court by day is transformed into the site of “This Magic Moment,” this year’s Co-Ed dance. Christmas vacation, 1993, is approaching, and the winter blahs have been fought off for this pivotal night.
A DJ spins the dance songs as couples break off to pose for those cherished photos their children will one day giggle at hysterically. Click. Yes, girls still sign their photo backs.
A few of the teen-agers are buzzing on wine, daring chaperons to catch them. Most are sober. And you can easily find a few griping about that.
“How can anyone loosen up?” one partier asks, mock incredulous.
The rules for this year’s Co-Ed: no drinking tolerated; no leaving the dance for any reason and no returning to the parking lot until the end, and no “inappropriate” attire--last year one girl wore a see-through dress. They have been warned a Breathalyzer may be employed.
“I think there’s less drinking and drugs than 10 years ago,” Principal Mitch Thomas says later. “I used to have to deny or carry away a kid from an event because he couldn’t walk. I think there’s still marijuana use among the kids today, but we used to get five-pound bags on kids (who would say), ‘Oh Mr. Thomas, I found it on my way to school and didn’t know what it was!’ You don’t see anything like that anymore.”
*
Amber Myers, a 17-year-old senior, has on a great dress from Contempo Casuals but is not happy with the dance music. “It’s old,” she said of the ‘80s tunes. Her date, Anthony, is a friend. “I don’t have a boyfriend. I was supposed to come with some guy. . . .”
An adorable blonde rushes up and collapses in a nearby chair. She has big cascading curls to go with her snit, as the 20 or so candidates for Co-Ed King are lined up for introduction, pageant style.
“I am so fat,” she says, all of maybe 100 pounds. “All the girls started hating me because I stole the guy they wanted. . . I was a slut, I was a virgin. It’s like they’re insecure in themselves. A lot of girls at school have to rip on each other,” she says, perfectly contemptuous and righteous. “I lived in the Bronx, and it’s like, ‘get a grip!’ ”
She has not spent all four years at La Quinta High School, and through her tough I’m-East-Coast bravado--one can see her frustration at not being fully accepted. Her boyfriend is obviously a Big Guy on Campus and the object of aggressive cute chicks. She sits in the shadows as another girl escorts him to the spotlight.
As Paul Herrera is announced the boy with the sexiest legs, the blonde claps, then says the girl escorting her boyfriend flattered herself by suggesting she might actually be able to steal the boyfriend.
“She says to me, ‘you wanna fight?’ ‘I’m like, what are you gonna do, stab me with mascara?’ ” The blonde starts laughing. “I mean, get a life!”
After the dance, she and her boyfriend are going alone to a hotel for the night with a hot tub in the room. The boyfriend’s parents, told that a group of kids were going to celebrate in the room, put the bill on their credit card.
After Watson Visuwan’s coronation, the blonde remarks that she’s happy “the W guy won. All these Vietnamese names--W, V--I don’t know them.” But she and the couples around her are pleased that Watson--an agreeable football and track star--was crowned Co-Ed king because he deserved it. Besides his other charms, he has school “spirit”--that vaguely defined quality that, say, Kurt Cobain lacked--and he gets along well with everybody. He fits in.
He is part of the mixed race troika of academic, student government and sports leadership that still reigns in school popularity. Associated Student Body President Jennifer Chapman is white; vice president Thanh Tang is Vietnamese.
While it can be said that the majority of students at La Quinta of all races coexist, even get along, there seems to be an unspoken code: Don’t make a big deal of it. I notice that terminology does not trip them up; they don’t seem to hesitate over whether to say Hispanic or Latino, black or African American.
Various students will talk off the record about racial differences--any differences, for that matter--and male students fresh off the dance floor collect around a blonde athlete as he starts to explain. “Like the Orientals,” he says, wiping his sweaty forehead with his tux sleeve.
“The Vietnamese people are totally cool with themselves,” says another athlete and class officer type. “They tend to get along with everyone because of that. . . . “
The group of guys--mostly white, with a few Latinos--goes on to sound off about all manner of school irritants.
“Those people who buy yearbooks, play sports, all’s they care about is themselves,” notes a brown-haired youth who does neither. He is bored, and the lingering effects of a marijuana joint smoked before the dance are starting to wear off. “The dance was fun. I love this school. I wanna go five years.”
Yeah, right.
*
For some reason, these guys couldn’t care less if I go to their post-dance party, as long as I don’t print anybody’s name without permission. Since I returned to my 1977 alma mater to chronicle the changed school, students have seemed comfortable with my presence at all sorts of public and private moments, trusting me not to hurt them.
Some of the Co-Ed goers are supposedly going night horseback riding, but the stables are way out in Corona. So it’s on to the party, on a Westminster cul-de-sac around the corner from where I grew up.
Arriving unfashionably early at 12:30 a.m., I have to wait parked across the street like a stakeout until the kids who invited me arrive. I don’t even have kids, and I feel like a parent. Souped up cars and trucks are screeching by at high speed, showing off for party-going stragglers outside. A voice in my head is screaming: “Someone could get killed!”
Everyone else seems unconcerned.
On the driveway around 1:30 a.m., a clutch of guys stands around drinking cans of Miller, which was absolutely easy to score at a nearby liquor store. They drift one or two at a time behind a hedge to smoke marijuana, and a few of the jocks pass around a pot pipe. It’s the only visible drug.
“You’re tossed!,” one kid says to a slightly tottering friend.
The party hostess--her dad was gone until later but knew of the party--wanders outside to say hello and then returns to the house, where all is low volume and extremely tame by the standards set in my mid-’70s days, when so many kids would attend a party sometimes that cars could not enter a street.
*
Along comes Eric Sizelove, a lanky senior on the water polo team. For now, he is “kickin’ it, having a mellow time.” For now, with the help of coaches and Principal Mitch Thomas, he is making it, bearing big dreams of a scholarship and a four-year college stint.
I had found Eric a few days before the Co-Ed, ditching his third period English class and lingering in the room of another teacher. Dressed in a long flannel shirt, backward hat and oversize jeans, he slouches in the teacher’s chair. His short hair is shiny brown, his earring shiny gold.
It is no accident that he appears like he can take care of himself, although his toothy smile distracts from the homeboy look. He is reading over one of his graded English papers while students are learning how to speak English in the background.
His story is no less sad for its familiarity. His father was killed in a motorcycle crash when Eric was in fourth grade, and life seems to have been a struggle ever since. His mother remarried a man Eric disliked, and years of battles followed, although stepfather and mother are now divorcing. His mother has been slowly dying of a lung disorder, but the two never discuss it beyond her being “really sick.”
A senior in high school, he has effectively been raising himself and not doing such a good job of it.
But transferring to La Quinta High School this year seems to have turned around some festering problems. Raised in a rough Westminster neighborhood, Eric grew up with gangs and their code of behavior. The fist or the knife or the gun answered an insult, some chump from enemy turf maddogging you.
By junior high school he had sent one schoolmate to the hospital.
“Before, I was a push toy; boys picked on me, and I had to prove to myself I wasn’t going to be like that. My freshman year I got straight A’s.”
But then he somehow broke his hand and was kicked off the Westminster High School basketball team for missing a game to visit his critically ill mother in the hospital. They told him he didn’t have the necessary determination and attitude, he says. One gets the sense quickly, however, that Eric had some other trouble at the school that he summarizes as constant fight-picking by “Asian gangs” because his clothes told them he was a rival Latino gangbanger.
Instead, Eric says, he was hanging out with 30 fellow members of a dance crew called Footprints, a group of guys that goes to clubs and dances against other crews. “We kicked out the druggies and gang types,” he notes.
“My crew” avoids battles, he contends, but he admits that competition at dance clubs over all manner of things--a glare, a girlfriend--routinely can lead to fights. Why?
“It’s just how life is,” he says with a slight shrug. “I face violence every day. I face violence when I wake up in the morning. It’s something that I have to do so I’m not a statistic.”
It is easy to see how some classmates and more than a few teachers conclude over time that trouble doesn’t follow Eric; he seems to ask for it with his confrontational mouth. He constantly has the periscope up, scanning for signs of disrespect.
“I never hurt someone with an object,” he says slowly, leaning back in the teacher’s wooden desk chair. “I don’t believe in hurting someone to the point of dying. When I was in seventh or eighth grade, I broke a couple of ribs, beat up a guy and put him in the hospital. Since my junior or senior year, I decided I wasn’t going to do that anymore.”
About midway through his time at Westminster High School, Eric’s angry-at-the-world attitude contributed to some other problems, and he transferred to La Quinta, a less tumultuous campus at the other side of the city.
A few days before the Co-Ed dance, he is saying that La Quinta has been better for him because it’s “safer, smaller, so people know each other and you have more of a sense that nobody’s gonna start trouble. But it’s more boring,” he adds.
Adults such as basketball coach Jim Perry and water polo coach Mark Cholette have worked tirelessly with Eric, knowing that sports could ultimately save him by delivering the identity, sense of belonging and worth that gangs gave him before.
They are sensitive to those times when he needs to miss water polo or basketball practice because his mother, a hairdresser when she can work, falls ill. But with the tenderness come unwavering rules. They are firm on discipline, being a team member and winning and losing with grace. And they watch him teeter on the fence, ready to catch him before he may fall.
So far, it has worked, and Eric appreciates that “school is good; teachers are nice, and Mr. Perry understands what I’m going through.”
*
The bell rings and class is over. After her mostly Vietnamese-speaking students leave the room, teacher Barbara Henry walks to her desk to hear how things went with Eric. I tell her I’m stunned by his resignation about his turbulent life, and to violence. She shakes her head, dark elbow-length hair falling over her shoulder. Dressed in jeans, a black sweater and loafers, she looks far younger than she is.
“Life is not as we remember it in high school,” she says with a deep exhale, and she sees this not just with her students but her children’s classmates. “They are dealing with so much more. The parents are at work all the time. These kids are raising themselves. You have to look around and say, ‘These kids are not as bad as they seem, given what they’re dealing with.’ You wonder how some of them make it. The kids who are coddled don’t always (make it). Those who have to work, do.”
From coach Perry’s standpoint, school officials do as much as they can--and then more. “The problem is, they gotta go back to their neighborhood.”
Of Eric, he says, “he and his stepdad don’t get along; his mom’s gonna die. You couldn’t pay me enough to be in that young man’s shoes. It’s easy to take care of non-problem kids who say please and thank you. Eric needs . . . somebody to chew on him. We got him through water polo with a lot of strokes. He was the only kid in the (Garden Grove) league who made the county all-star team. He’s got some really good skills. He’s interested in one of the Top 10 college water polo programs in America.”
For now, Eric is concentrating on making the basketball team. But he will have more than that to worry about by spring.
