PROM
I did not attend my high school prom. Nobody attended my high school prom, but that was 1972, and after the intervening years, prom is back with a vengeance.
High school graduation is a portal moment, with deep and unifying roots in the culture. Americans get married in different ways, celebrate different holidays, grieve separately and apart.
Graduation is different. Even if we're on the outside looking in, we learn the Happy Days model from earliest childhood: the tux, the corsage, the sequined dress for prom night. With all of this training, it should be easy on the nerves: a transition smoothed by ritual and artifice. The machine of graduation should produce predictable results, without chaotic dislocation or broken bones. But it never really works out that way. Emotions erupt in ugly spasms, heaving lava, ash, and plumes of gas. The rhythms of the season are thrown off by feelings. There is loss, regret, and jockeying for position. Everything is suffused by sex.
My own work here is about ragged edges: the furious anger of the neglected prom girl; the minority student who cannot find his place. With violent clarity, the ritual invariably fails to bind each student to a healthy and cohesive community.
