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.