The Prom

Throughout my life, I have never been able to do anything with dignity.

Even during many of my life's major milestones, my supposed moments to shine, I have somehow ended up with egg on my face. Take the first and last Annual Extended Family Talent Show, for example. As a six year-old, it seemed like a very big deal, so I rehearsed my act for weeks in advance. When the day of the big show finally came, I stood in the middle of the living room with my aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and that creepy boyfriend my older cousin had inappropriately invited, waiting for my cue. I was so excited that I was bouncing around like a maniac. That's when, as per usual, things took a turn for the embarrassing. My dad delivered the fatal blow. ce


That ended up being the entirety of my act that year.

Sadly, my dad was actually correct.

I also thought my high school graduation might be a time of potential dignity. Not so. Despite having practiced my speech for weeks, and despite delivering it with great aplomb, I ended up falling flat on may face.

Literally, I ended up falling flat on my face.

So when the senior prom came along, why did I ever think it would be a normal, American, teenage rite-of-passage?

It all started when I picked up my date, Tammy, at her house. Her family waved as we drove off. Of course, her little 8 year-old sister chased after a ball and dashed into the driveway in front of the car.

It was an awkward departure. Next, Tammy and I headed to the pre-party at my friend's house. We had to park down the street and then walk along the sidewalk toward his home, me in my tuxedo and she in her dress.

You know how people tend to gawk at prom kids? Well one woman driving down the street did it for a little too long and failed to see the truck stopped in front of her.

She had been traveling at about 35 mph and so the airbag deployed. There was a lot of smoke. Some bystanders had to drag her unconscious body out of the car.

We turned to walk up the driveway to the party to find that everyone was outside.


Apparently, nothing kills a pre-party like a little face-slamming-into-airbag-at-high-velocity action.

Things picked back up when the cops arrived and let us pose in handcuffs by the squad car. Our pictures ended up looking something like this:

It wasn't your typical pre-prom shoot. Finally, it was time to go. That's when we realized that we were missing something.

We waited and waited. After a while, a limo actually did pass the house. Thinking it was our limo that had simply gotten lost, Tammy took off down the street after it.
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In a cruel twist of fate, that wasn't our limo. My friend John called and learned that they had no record of our reservation...despite the DEPOSIT WE HAD PAID!!!

We ended up calling a cab and cramming our whole group into it like one of those clown cars at the circus. When we arrived at the entrance of the prom, we just tumbled out into the street.

The prom itself was great! Tammy was a huge hit.

After the prom, everyone climbed into their spacious limos to be whisked away to the after-party. My group stuffed itself into another cab. On the plus side, as we rode to the party, Tammy made friends with the driver.

At the after-party, an intoxicated football player became drunk-obsessed with throwing me in the pool, so I basically spent the evening ducking behind pillars and clawing at the at the patio tiles. It was actually a really fun night.

No dignity, but lots of fun. It was pretty standard.

Surviving the Weather

In my high school, it was somewhat of a tradition to torture our French teachers. I can't exactly explain why it was French teachers in particular. I think we discovered them to be quite resilient and pretty lenient, so we took full advantage. Once in middle school, when our French teacher leaned over my friend's desk to see that he had not done his homework, he actually patted her on the cheek twice, mimed putting money down her shirt, and said, "Let's just pretend none of this ever happened, alright?"

One high school example that stands out as being particularly hilarious involved an assignment to give a ten minute instructional speech in French for the rest of the class. The idea was that it would be about "How to [fill in the blank with any sort of task]." We quickly wore the teacher down to letting us film a ten minute instructional video as long as it featured ten minutes of continuous speaking, which quickly evolved into us trying to create hilarious videos with funny editing and very little French.

My friends John and Katie came over on the Sunday before the due date to help me film my video. Naturally, I picked the topic "How to Cover Your Tracks When You Accidentally Run Someone Over With Your Car." We spent all day staging the accident. One of the best and most graphic frames, ended up looking like this:

And of course, there was this:

And finally:

It was about 9:00 pm when we were able to officially say "That's a wrap." Katie went home and then we realized that we had spent all day on my project and never made a video for John. We had to put something together fast, which didn't bode well for the quality of the video.

We decided to do something simple: "How to Survive Severe Weather." This was a good idea because John was terrible at French but seemed to have a knack for remembering vocabulary words about "les temps." He figured he would only have to say words like "la pluie" for rain, and "la grele" for hail while we flashed images of these conditions on the screen. The problem was, we really didn't have images of these things. That's when we got the brilliant idea to get our parents involved.

The idea was that each of our parents would dress up like a certain type of weather. John's mom would be the Duchess of Hail, his father the Rain Knight. I'm still not exactly sure what my dad was supposed to be, but I recall that my mother played the Wind Queen.

The crazy thing was that they actually agreed to it. Keep in mind that our parents are successful, respectable, upstanding members of their communities. John's father is recognized as a top attorney, my mother is the head of counseling at a prep school, and my dad ran a successful company selling medical supply products. But here they were, dressed in bathrobes with weapons made out of construction paper, attacking John as he tried to survive the weather.

The plot was basic. John walked around my living room encountering attacks from the different elements (our parents). Looking into the camera, he would explain what one should do. For example, as he rounded the couch, his mother came out screaming "La Grele! La Grele!" like an angry witch-banshee while smashing him in the head with an ice cube. Then, in broken French, John looked at the camera and said something about needing to put a helmet on.

The grand finale was when I hit play on the stereo, blasting the "Fight Club" theme song, and all the parents attacked at once while chanting "Les Temps! Les Temps!" They swarmed him and spun around him in a circle until he busted free from the middle with his fist as they scattered and spun away in all directions. The idea was that they would spin out of the frame and John could end the scene by saying "And that's how you survive the weather" in English (because we weren't sure how to say that in French), but of course my mom was still in the frame without realizing it, just sort of looking at the camera and waiting for it to be over. We thought this was the best part of the whole video, and it was late, so we called it a wrap and everyone went home.

The next day the teacher confiscated both our videos.