After an extremely slow and relatively uneventful school year, things pick up the pace in May. Spring sports teams are finishing their seasons at state, seniors are graduating and frankly everyone is ready to get out of the school ASAP. There is just one last hurdle to overcome: prom. Prom is the dance every girl fantasizes about for years. It all starts when you’re a little girl. You see all the movies, magazine covers and older girls having the absolute time of their life at prom with their perfect dates and perfect dresses. It makes you dream about what your prom will be like. So when the day of prom actually comes, it hits you like a ton of bricks. You can’t help but think to yourself, “this is it?”
Prom sucks. I said it, prom sucks. I don’t even think its prom’s fault that it’s so horrible. It’s just that the preconceived notion of prom sets it up to be this magical night where your life will change forever and you’ll fall in love, riding off into the night with all of your best friends while “Forever Young” by Alphaville plays melodically in the background.
The reality of the situation is that you might not even have a date in the traditional sense of the term. You just want to go to prom so desperately that you’ll go with whoever you can find. And depending on who and how you pick, you might be able to have fun. Now we’re talking best case scenario. Even if you get a date who is at least fun, there are bound to be awkward times. Like when you have to find a group to go in and everyone in it is a couple who seems to be hearing Alphaville in their minds the entire night while you’re concerned about whether or not it would be too weird to ask your date to dance. Is that too weird? I mean how do you dance anyways?
You really can’t dance at prom. The dresses you have to wear are either so heavy you can’t lift them up to dance or so tight your dress will literally split in half if you try to move. So now what else is there to do but awkwardly smile and try to make conversation with your date that you are quickly realizing is the most boring human being alive? All you can do is sit there and look at all the other students doing the same thing while a bop from 2007 plays over the stereo. Seriously, what is up with the music we play at school dances? Thanks PV, nothing makes me want to dance more than Bulletproof and Poker Face!
And another thing, who decided that prom was going to be more expensive than graduating high school? Grad parties are expensive which is understandable. We’re graduating from four years of hard work and pain. Paying for being done is more than fine by me. But then we get prom which is one night out of those four years and it costs the same. Hair, makeup, tans, dresses, dinner, pictures, flowers and nails all together can cost over a thousand dollars for some people. Why do we do this? Why do we spend so much money to stand around and not be able to dance, have to listen to horrible music and hear stories from our dates we didn’t want? Is prom really worth it just so we can post “Prom ready!” on snapchat and “Prom 2018” on Instagram? My vote is no. And with all of this being said, I will see you all in a month bumping to 2008 Kesha.
