On my eighth birthday, I received a softball bat and ball. I was delighted. That evening after supper, we went outside to play on the neighbor's field (which he kept mowed for the neighborhood kids to play ball on). I remember staying outside until long after the sun set. My bedtime back then was 8:00, and I know I was still outside playing softball in the twilight then. The glow of the sky, the warmth of the air, the crack of the bat - these are some of my favorite childhood birthday memories.
I have many other happy birthday memories, but this one always reminds me of how long the days are getting by mid-May. It's still light at 8 p.m., even on the endless gray days we've been having recently.
I always thought May was the best month to be born in. The days are usually warm without being too hot. My mother's back yard was full of lilacs and other spring flowers. I was given a Mayflower viburnum bush for my birthday one year, and it was always covered with fragrant blossoms by my birthday. The yard was full of lilies of the valley and violets (both purple and white), and somebody would usually pick me a nosegay for my birthday. Down by the woods, the bluets and wild violets were in bloom. My sister and I used to make May baskets out of paper cups for our grandmother and the elderly woman who lived next door to her. We'd fill them with wildflowers and leave them on their doorknobs on May Day morning before we went to school. (It helped that our school was practically next door to those houses.)
Today, a house sits on the old ball field. It's been there for a good 30 years, probably closer to 40. My mother's house will be on the market soon. I'm allergic to lilacs, but I'm still considering planting a shoot from one of hers in my yard. Nobody has picked me a nosegay in years. Yeah, I miss them. I just threw out the forsythia that was in my little vase, and I'd love to have something new in it.
May took on a different aspect as I got older. School is winding down for the year. Most colleges have exams and graduation in May. Every committee I used to be on had its final meeting and banquet in May. Choirs I have sung in (or rung in) tend to have concerts in May. Our handbell choir gave one on May 1st. When I was in college, my birthday tended to fall during reading week, and there was almost always a party (for me and all of the other May birthdays - there are a ton of us, and most of us are on Facebook). We needed the study break. What better excuse?
Sometimes I feel as if my days are drawing to a close, that I've hit my own late May twilight. When I sat down to write this, that's the direction I thought I'd be heading. But right now, I don't really feel that way. Maybe there will be more birthdays filled with flowers (that don't make me sneeze!) and sunshine. Not this year (at least for the sunshine). But there's a flicker of hope somewhere inside of me, one that it's been harder to keep alive recently. May it continue to flicker.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
That rite of passage, the Prom
I did not go to my high school prom.
Last night's Glee episode, entitled "Prom Queen", has me thinking about the prom in general. If there are any Gleeks out there among my handful of readers who haven't watched the episode, please consider this a SPOILER ALERT!
Let's start with the struggle to find a date for the prom. I never dated in high school. It wasn't my choice, but there weren't any brave young men at my high school who would take the risk of being seen with a fat chick. Or at least not with me, smart, moody, sarcastic, with absolutely no sense of style. So, not surprisingly, nobody asked me to the prom. I've consoled myself with the fact that, on prom night, I was home with a fever of 101° (turned out I had rubella), so I wouldn't have been able to go even if I'd spent the money on a dress and a corsage and a ticket. But I still wish I'd had a chance to go.
One of my favorite characters on Glee this season is Lauren Zizes, played by the talented Ashley Fink. Lauren is a fat chick, and she does exactly what she wants. She's dating one of the most popular guys in the school, Puck, and they're running for Prom King and Queen. She didn't have to worry about finding a date - just finding a dress. "I've been to Ann Taylor Loft, Filene's Basement, and, like, six Forever 21s and I cannot find a dress that fits," she wailed. (She should have tried Lord & Taylor - that's where I got my mother-of-the-bride dress, which is the dress I would have worn to the prom all those years ago.) There was a great scene in a dress shop, where the girls had brought Kurt along to be their fashion adviser. Lauren came out in a horrible ruffled yellow number. "I think I look like a lemon meringue pie," she moaned. I'm not sure how they found the dress she ultimately wore, which was royal blue and looked great.
Through this scene, I was thinking about what it might have been like for me to find a dress that fit in 1968, and I'm glad I didn't have to go through that struggle. I know I would have ended up sewing one myself. That was how I survived high school; I knew how to enlarge a size 16 pattern to fit myself, so I could stitch up copies of whatever was in style. The trouble with sewing something for yourself, though, is that you can never be sure what it's going to look like on you until it's done. So I could have easily bought yards of expensive fabric and ended up looking like a poorly-upholstered sofa.
Then there's Mercedes, who is a little plump and doesn't have a boyfriend. She and Rachel asked Sam to the prom. Sam is currently broke and living with his family in a motel room, so they kept it low-budget (sure, they did...those girls found some great dresses at Goodwill, if that was true). I fall in size somewhere between Mercedes and Lauren, and I know that when I was in high school I would have been delighted to find a store that carried my size.
Kurt asked his boyfriend Blaine, and then dressed up in a kilt for the occasion. I hadn't heard the leak of who would be voted Prom Queen, so when it turned out to be Kurt I was duly horrified. That's the kind of cruel trick that I always worry somebody will pull on me - the fat, ugly, unpopular chick getting called out as the winner in a contest I would never even enter. Anyway, Kurt pulled it off, and even danced with Blaine after he was crowned. I don't believe this would ever be allowed to happen in a real high school; even if cruel kids wrote in a gay guy for prom queen, the principal would never allow the vote to count. In typical Glee irony, the prom king was the closeted gay guy, Karofsky, who was supposed to be paired with Santana, who discovered this season that she's a lesbian.
The music the Glee kids performed turned out to be a collection of really bad songs - was this intentional? It might have been. That YouTube sensation, "Friday", which I had managed to avoid hearing until then; "Jar of Hearts", which always sounds to me as if the young woman wrote it in a notebook during some boring class in high school - "You're going to catch a cold/from the ice inside your soul..." Really? Ewww. They ended with ABBA's "Dancing Queen", which is a classic but still, when you think about it, a pretty weak song. (Sorry, I was never an ABBA fan.)
So I'm left wondering if anybody really had a good time at the Glee prom. Finn and Jesse St. James had a fight (over Rachel!) and were evicted from the prom before the King and Queen were announced, which ruined Quinn's evening. She expected she and Finn would win. Artie could never convince Brittany to go with him; she chose to go alone. He consoled himself by spiking the punch, but Sue Sylvester caught him. (He was spiking it with lemonade.) Santana was furious because her date won Prom King and she didn't win Prom Queen. Karofsky was miserable, just because of his struggle with being gay and not ready to come out.
Chances are that even if I'd gone to my own prom, I wouldn't have had fun. But I still find myself regretting that I didn't go, and wishing that, at my advanced age, I could have another chance to deck myself out in a pretty dress and a corsage and go to a formal dance with a nice guy.
Last night's Glee episode, entitled "Prom Queen", has me thinking about the prom in general. If there are any Gleeks out there among my handful of readers who haven't watched the episode, please consider this a SPOILER ALERT!
Let's start with the struggle to find a date for the prom. I never dated in high school. It wasn't my choice, but there weren't any brave young men at my high school who would take the risk of being seen with a fat chick. Or at least not with me, smart, moody, sarcastic, with absolutely no sense of style. So, not surprisingly, nobody asked me to the prom. I've consoled myself with the fact that, on prom night, I was home with a fever of 101° (turned out I had rubella), so I wouldn't have been able to go even if I'd spent the money on a dress and a corsage and a ticket. But I still wish I'd had a chance to go.
One of my favorite characters on Glee this season is Lauren Zizes, played by the talented Ashley Fink. Lauren is a fat chick, and she does exactly what she wants. She's dating one of the most popular guys in the school, Puck, and they're running for Prom King and Queen. She didn't have to worry about finding a date - just finding a dress. "I've been to Ann Taylor Loft, Filene's Basement, and, like, six Forever 21s and I cannot find a dress that fits," she wailed. (She should have tried Lord & Taylor - that's where I got my mother-of-the-bride dress, which is the dress I would have worn to the prom all those years ago.) There was a great scene in a dress shop, where the girls had brought Kurt along to be their fashion adviser. Lauren came out in a horrible ruffled yellow number. "I think I look like a lemon meringue pie," she moaned. I'm not sure how they found the dress she ultimately wore, which was royal blue and looked great.
Through this scene, I was thinking about what it might have been like for me to find a dress that fit in 1968, and I'm glad I didn't have to go through that struggle. I know I would have ended up sewing one myself. That was how I survived high school; I knew how to enlarge a size 16 pattern to fit myself, so I could stitch up copies of whatever was in style. The trouble with sewing something for yourself, though, is that you can never be sure what it's going to look like on you until it's done. So I could have easily bought yards of expensive fabric and ended up looking like a poorly-upholstered sofa.
Then there's Mercedes, who is a little plump and doesn't have a boyfriend. She and Rachel asked Sam to the prom. Sam is currently broke and living with his family in a motel room, so they kept it low-budget (sure, they did...those girls found some great dresses at Goodwill, if that was true). I fall in size somewhere between Mercedes and Lauren, and I know that when I was in high school I would have been delighted to find a store that carried my size.
Kurt asked his boyfriend Blaine, and then dressed up in a kilt for the occasion. I hadn't heard the leak of who would be voted Prom Queen, so when it turned out to be Kurt I was duly horrified. That's the kind of cruel trick that I always worry somebody will pull on me - the fat, ugly, unpopular chick getting called out as the winner in a contest I would never even enter. Anyway, Kurt pulled it off, and even danced with Blaine after he was crowned. I don't believe this would ever be allowed to happen in a real high school; even if cruel kids wrote in a gay guy for prom queen, the principal would never allow the vote to count. In typical Glee irony, the prom king was the closeted gay guy, Karofsky, who was supposed to be paired with Santana, who discovered this season that she's a lesbian.
The music the Glee kids performed turned out to be a collection of really bad songs - was this intentional? It might have been. That YouTube sensation, "Friday", which I had managed to avoid hearing until then; "Jar of Hearts", which always sounds to me as if the young woman wrote it in a notebook during some boring class in high school - "You're going to catch a cold/from the ice inside your soul..." Really? Ewww. They ended with ABBA's "Dancing Queen", which is a classic but still, when you think about it, a pretty weak song. (Sorry, I was never an ABBA fan.)
So I'm left wondering if anybody really had a good time at the Glee prom. Finn and Jesse St. James had a fight (over Rachel!) and were evicted from the prom before the King and Queen were announced, which ruined Quinn's evening. She expected she and Finn would win. Artie could never convince Brittany to go with him; she chose to go alone. He consoled himself by spiking the punch, but Sue Sylvester caught him. (He was spiking it with lemonade.) Santana was furious because her date won Prom King and she didn't win Prom Queen. Karofsky was miserable, just because of his struggle with being gay and not ready to come out.
Chances are that even if I'd gone to my own prom, I wouldn't have had fun. But I still find myself regretting that I didn't go, and wishing that, at my advanced age, I could have another chance to deck myself out in a pretty dress and a corsage and go to a formal dance with a nice guy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
