Prom Night is written by Upper School English Teacher Tom Keating, a regular contributor to The Flex in his popular monthly column, The Round Table.
If you ask us grownups to recall our fondest memories, you’ll probably get some predictable responses: graduations, weddings, births of children. But the Prom? How many people put Prom Night on their list of all-time experiences? Well, I do, and I’m here to tell you why. Although my Prom dates back to the Nixon presidency, it remains a sacred memory. And not because I glorify it in a haze of romantic nostalgia. Believe me, my Prom was no fairy tale; it was a thousand miles from perfect. But in a strange way, that’s what made it so special then, and so cherished now. In its ups and downs, its glory and folly, it truly was a night to remember.
To explain why, let’s go back to my senior year in high school. Prom was a big deal for me, something I had anticipated for years. So I devised a grandiose Prom strategy: forget going with a friend, or a friend’s friend. Prom was a magical night; you should ask someone you barely know, someone beyond your wildest expectations, sort of like a “reach” school in college admissions. That’s what I wanted, and I had the perfect candidate in mind: Sue Renlinger. She was smart and popular, and I hardly knew her. Asking her was a total risk, but that’s what I wanted, so I set my plan in motion. All well and good, except by definition, a reach is, well, hard. For all my pre-planning, I couldn’t summon the nerve to ask her—it was simply too “out of nowhere”. Plus, I was still pretty shy about the opposite sex. Then one day in the cafeteria, I overheard someone ask her to Prom; thankfully, she declined, but I realized if I didn’t ask soon, she would end up going with someone else. So I resolved to call that weekend. Saturday came; I couldn’t do it. I went out to our driveway where we had a basketball rim and said to myself, “I will take ten free throws and then call”. I took my shots—couldn’t call. “Take twenty,” I said. Twenty became forty, fifty, and then a hundred. My mom, who had driven off when I started shooting, returned an hour later and I was still at it; I think I was somewhere around five hundred. “Getting ready for your NBA tryout?” she asked. “No, Mom, I’m trying to get a Prom date.” She gave me a look that seemed to say, is this really my child? She left, and I realized it was now or never. I went inside, looked up the number, and dialed. Sue’s voice answered on the second ring. Of the thousand possible lines I had imagined for the moment, none materialized. So I simply blundered forth. “Hi, this is Tom Keating, and I’m wondering, would you join me at the Prom?” “I’d love to,” she said. With that, a feeling of ecstasy flooded my body. Alexander could not have felt better the day he conquered Persia. My dream night was set.
Or so I thought. Standard preparations went well: table with friends, rented tux, corsage. The big challenge was transportation. In those days, everyone drove to prom—no limos. I owned a car, but it was a clunker. However, I knew a family at school, the Barones, and they had a shiny Fleetwood Cadillac, twenty feet long and loaded with chrome. Perfect. I saw Richie Barone waiting for his ride, so I jokingly told him to ask his mom if I could borrow her Cadillac. Before I could stop him, he did. Mrs. Barone walked over and said, “Let me get this straight: you want to borrow my car for your Prom?” As I fumbled for something between an excuse and an apology, she asked what time would I like to pick it up? Again, my body welled with contentment. My goal of a perfect Prom was now tangibly within reach.
Or so I thought. The fateful night arrived, and I drove over to pick up my date. As I breezed along a country road, my mind raced with possibilities for the evening. Suddenly, a stray dog bolted before the car. I didn’t hit him, but my evasive maneuver caused the Cadillac to do a complete 360-degree spin. Think NASCAR. Incredibly, the car emerged unscathed, and my composure stabilized almost immediately. I actually drove off feeling lucky: clearly, the worst of Prom Night was over; everything that followed was going to be perfect.
Or so I thought. At the Renlinger home, I made small talk with Sue’s dad while she was upstairs getting ready. Mr. Renlinger stood six foot five, and he told me that, in high school, he had been Pennsylvania state champion in the javelin throw. I was about to say I was back-up catcher on the JV baseball team when he walked over and took my hand in his giant, bone-crushing paw. Take care of my little girl, he said. Before I could answer, Sue descended the stairs, and nothing I had seen, read, or lived could have prepared me for that moment—the heart-flip instant when a young man sees his Prom date dressed up for the first time. And nothing could diminish its power—not my road mishap, not Mr. Renlinger’s emasculating handshake, not my adolescent self-consciousness. To quote Lou Gehrig, I simply felt like the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
Or so I thought. For all the rollercoaster ride of my preparations, the actual Prom was pretty mundane, like a high school dance. Tacky decorations, soda refreshments, the Beatles playing on a lousy sound system. Fortunately, no video recording survives. But somehow, none of that really mattered. I was with my date and we were getting along. I looked to after Prom for things to pick up.
Or so I thought. We all went to a designated after-Prom party, and I saw this as a chance to socialize in a more relaxed setting. The problem was I was still pretty nervous. Remember, I was shy, I didn’t know my date very well, and my air of self-confidence was largely an act. We arrived, and as I exited the car, I accidentally locked the keys inside with the engine still running. You wouldn’t think that was physically possible, but there the Cadillac sat, securely locked, engine softly purring. The only solution was an utterly humiliating one: call Mrs. Barone to drive over with the spare keys. She arrived twenty minutes later, and as her mini van pulled up, I thought, “great, here comes the soccer mom to my rescue.” She got out and shook her head. “How’s it going,” she asked. “So far, Mrs. Barone, kind of mixed.” She laughed and put her arm around my shoulder. “Hang in there, Tiger; you’re looking good.” With that, she handed me the keys and was off.
The rest of my Prom was pretty anticlimactic. I actually had to work the next day, so I dropped off my date and slogged through an eight-hour shift mowing lawns, then gave the Cadillac a quick wash and returned it, good as new. The next day, I called Sue and asked her on a date. We started going out and she became my girlfriend. It was wonderful. Even Mr. Renlinger turned out to be a great guy. And my Prom? Well, it had a bit of everything: sublime joy, near catastrophe, and of course, that painful insecurity which is such a part of growing up. One of my all-time favorite Pingry students is a girl named Marissa Bialecki, and she once defined the awkwardness of adolescence as getting lost on your way to a party you don’t want to attend anyway. There was more than a little of that awkwardness at my Prom, but I wouldn’t trade its memory for the world. For all its twists and turns, it was a fitting final chapter to high school, a kind of one-night microcosm of my topsy-turvy teenage years. Of course, these days, I’m a very different person, and now April is more about paying taxes than getting a Prom date. But every spring as Pingry’s Prom approaches, I grow deeply nostalgic for my lost youth, and I still get a thrill thinking about that young kid in a polyester tux and a Cadillac, picking up his date to head off for the night of his life.
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To contact the author: Mr. Keating