prom date

i was in charge of both of them, junior and senior. how did that happen? it must be that i had an inkling (or my classmates did) that i was, you know, 'good that way'. i had skills, decorating, organizing, stage directing, delegating, making something pretty out of nothing. junior year we took over a former chapel and erected scrims, backlit with life-sized cut-out silhouettes of speakeasy figures playing horns, dancing, high and happy. we transformed an unappealing rectangle into teen noir. i asked a girl from summer vacation to come down from Boston to Philly for the big night. i knew she was not a going-out-with girl, but someone who would make me look cool on the twist-again-like-we-did-last-summer dance floor and who was terrificly cute, with a wispy voice like Mia Farrow. maybe i hoped she'd make it seem as if i 'scored'. at any rate the effort got me elected class fucking president and senior prom chairlady. whoppee. over the summer before the our last shot at living-at-home-and-breaking-all-the-rules my best friends and i got drunk on a beach in Avalon, NJ. cold beer was delivered (we ordered by phone with a 'dad' voice). crushed cans littered the sidewalk from porch to ocean. throughout, i was thinking (god help me) 'prom'. when we spotted a 50's cover band loading into a VFW hall, we got their card and booked them, puffed up about what a hot thicket we knew they'd be. live music was a rarity in those days. standing next to a bonfire and staring at the stars we decided that for this last-in-a-lifetime promenade we would transform the high school gym, a big nasty echoing sweaty box, into an out-of-the-park-into-the-gym garden. we'd 'borrow' trees, flowers, shrubbery, earth, rocks, worms and weeds as a full-on midnight caper. we got a van and a pick up truck. we blackened our faces like teen-age special forces drunk on shitty beer. we appropriated our weapons of choice - hedge clippers, saws, gloves and goggles - as we cruised the hood and stole Eden. motoring up to the shoulder of a main line mansion, we'd belly crawl to an innocent tree or bush, hack at it and watch it quiver, seize up, tip over and collapse - a green corpse dragged across an immaculate lawn and flipped into the van. we did this over and over again until we had enough garden poofery to convert the gym into 'paradise'. it even smelled like outdoors. 'how did you guys pull this off?' the faculty advisor asks. 'we ah...i dunno...we just did it. contributions from families of the class of '63'. i asked another summertime girl to be my 'date', girl as corsage. she looked like Natalie Wood in Rebel Without A Cause, a total babe. god knows i must have disappointed her in the get-it-on department, but so what. my over-compensatory huge event made the girlfriend ruse worth the ticket and besides, i loved impersonating as impresario. i suppose it carried over into all that show biz fluff i did later on. funny about high school.