Saturday, March 18, 2000
Prom should be fun, safe, not over the top
BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
We'll admit it. We've never seen anything like it. When we, your doting parents, were in high school, the prom was a night to drop a whole hundred bucks on dancing (maybe in the high school gym), bowling and having our hair made into something that looked like an ant hill.
The pictures would scare small children.
So we look on in shock as you slip into your slinky black dress that cost more than our wedding gown and pull off in your stretch limo for a night in fine restaurants, splashy party centers and sometimes — but not in your case — rented hotel rooms.
Part of us envies you. Part of us feels sorry for you.
Fast-forward lives
You are high-stakes kids, raised to compete, to be the best and have the best. All your life, everything has come early for you. You learned to read at the age we were still practicing our colors. You hit league play and select soccer about the time we were perfecting tag and roller skating. And, since elementary school, no less than the state legislature itself has sunk a boatload of money into guaranteeing that you're proficient.
In all, you must have had about three weeks to be a kid.
So it doesn't surprise us that your prom would be glitzier, costlier and riskier than our own — that, in some schools, the event becomes a giant competition to outdress, outspend and outrage everyone else. For some teen-agers, the evening is more about impressing others than having a good time with someone significant.
We hope we've raised you better.
May you have a wonderful time. May you dance the night away with someone whose name you will still remember in July. May you leave with an evening of splendid memories, and your sobriety — and the family car — intact.
Plenty to worry about
Will we worry? Of course we will. Too much drinking, too much driving and too little sleep has made prom night one of the most dangerous nights to be a teen-ager. Even if you make wise choices, we have to depend on every other kid in every other car making wise choices, too.
But we'll worry about more than just keeping you alive.
We'll worry about how respectfully you treated your date, and yourself.
We'll worry that you've learned the disappointing lesson that enjoyment sometimes has an inverse relationship to the amount of money spent on it.
We'll worry that success at “getting away with something” will make prom night an evening that, at age 30, you'll cringe to remember.
And, somewhere in there, we'll have the nagging fear that all your lives, you've had too much Special and far too little Significant.
So after all the pictures are taken and warnings delivered, we will send you off to the prom with a prayer for your safety, but also for your integrity and your joy.
Go for it — sensibly
We will hope that, when the evening's over, you'll feel you were in control of your spending, your driving, your gross motor skills and your behavior. That you made a night for yourself and your date that was your own, not a poor attempt to live up to somebody else's.
And that you'll get — not what everybody says you get on prom night — but the thing you've really been shortchanged on.
Fun.
You can tell us to bow out, chill out, zone out. Sorry, not a chance.
You can tell us that Geoffrey's parents rented him a hotel room or Saundra's mother bought the booze. Doesn't matter.
We may have come of age in the time of ant-hill hairdos, but we've learned a thing or two about life.
Yours is precious, for one thing. Your date's is, too.
Party smart.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati, OH 45202, or e-mail her at krista_ramsey@hotmail.com.