The Prom

If ever I was in the pits of hell, it was at the time of my high school senior prom. The Prom was somehow made to seem like the reward on the other side of a magic arch. One exits from the miseries of high school and enters, through the Prom, the independence of the big world, like Cinderella entered the royal castle through the ball. I lived in Naperville, Illinois which at that time had a population of 15,000 people, many of them working in the Kroehler Furniture Factory, many others commuting 30 rail miles to Chicago on the Burlington Line. Their 1940 crop of offspring were my 199 classmates. By April 1958, we and our teachers had done all we could do together scholastically and we were exhausted.

Now began talk about The Prom. In fact, it had begun some time before I realized I needed a date and quite a number of my classmates had already paired off. Those were the days when only boys did the asking and girls were the passive victims. Permanently in place were the couples that were practically engaged and, as expected, the alpha males had claimed the three popular Judys and two popular Bettys. After that, all sorts of surprise and non-surprise combinations of girls and guys had happened. More to the point, I had no date. I had no illusions about my allure but had pinned hope on one or two of the boys I chatted with sometimes. But they did not ask me. Every day dashed me into ever-greater misery. My awards and honor society membership no longer meant anything. To miss The Prom seemed now to mean I had spent my high school years in a black hole.

Then Frank Groves asked me to go with him. I did know who he was because sometime in the last ten years of classroom roll-calls he had been in some classes with me but had I ever talked to the guy? I don’t know. He hung out with the greasy car guys. He was gawky and probably had yellow teeth but now he was my visa from misery into Prom happiness. I said yes.

There is little to be told about the actual prom evening. A tuxedoed Frank appeared at 7:30, hair slicked down like a grease patch, a boxed pink carnation corsage in hand. My immigrant parents gazed at this prom phenomenon in fascination and at me with pride. My brother is smirking—although I know he is away at college, in my mind’s eye I see him standing there, smirking. I am wearing a light gauzy pink formal dress but I don’t look good in it. My shoulders are too wide and my skin too much the same shade of pale as the dress. Frank has a hard time figuring out how to get the corsage attached to me without touching me so my mother comes to the rescue. Thank god we are double dating, with two other losers. Frank is driving his Studebaker. He has apparently rebuilt the car innumerable times and is very proud of it. It is his one topic of conversation. The dancing is a blur, but we stumble around gamely, even to some of the slow mushy pieces during which the engaged couples are glued together. “O my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch…” I see some people are having fun, laughing and smiling but others look just like I, and probably Frank, feel. My feet, unaccustomed to high heels, hurt; the garter belt is pinching my hips and the strapless bra has its own type of torture. At 1 a.m. the band plays its final piece and we, like everyone, go for post-dance eating. We drive to a pizza place; finally the pizza arrives and finally the night is over. Frank gives me the dreaded good-night kiss on my doorstep. It’s a little peck and I have survived the first half of this coming of age ritual.

At 10 a.m. the trio, Frank, Larry and Mary, pick me up and we head to Starved Rock State Park, an hour and a half drive from Naperville. Now we are to have fun in the sunlight. Our little group could walk 13 miles of trails, over bluffs and canyons and climb the namesake bluff overlooking the Illinois River. The “Starved Rock” comes from a native American (we said “Indian” in 1958) legend that had a band of Potawatomi avenging the killing of their chief by trapping a band of Illiniweks on the top of the 125 foot high rock and letting them starve to death. Personally, I thought to myself, I would have leapt off into the river rather than starve. Anyway, as soon as I heard that the name of the chief being avenged was Pontiac, I knew why the two car guys had chosen this place for our outing day. (Coincidentally, both of my family’s cars were Pontiacs.) After the long and boring ride it felt good to hit the trails in single file. First we went to the top of that starving rock to gaze around. The river was pretty far down. Each of us knew that we had the unspoken mission of seeming to have fun and that it involved staying until at least four o’clock. We headed down the nearest trail.

After a few minutes we came to a sort of pond. 6 or 8 people were standing at its edge shouting at a kid splashing in the middle of it. They were telling him to come out but it seemed clear to me that he was panicked and couldn’t do anything other than bob up and down, splash, scream and swallow water. I kicked off my shoes and waded in and pretty soon I had to swim to get to him though he was only about ten feet from the edge. Luckily I was a Junior Life Saver, as I think everyone in Naperville was, so I dragged him out, cutting my foot on a broken bottle on the last step. The kid’s parents grabbed him, thanked me and hustled him off to dry clothes. Several people came over and said, “Great job!” and told me to get a band-aid for my foot. I was shivering and clearly I had to get home. The ride seemed short since we suddenly had a lot to talk about. We stopped at a drive-in on the way for a burger and milkshakes each and arrived in Naperville content and happy. We had survived the prom ordeal, had had an adventure and ended the day early, legitimately.

There was a short paragraph in our weekly “The Naperville Clarion” the following Thursday about the “bold rescue” of a drowning child by a high school student from Naperville. It seems that someone at the rescue scene had asked my three companions for my name and where we were from. That's how I survived The Prom,became a wiser woman and even achieved my fifteen minutes of fame before my eighteenth birthday.