Opening salvos in the battle over prom

I understand it's only March. There's still snow on the ground. There's still snow in the forecast.

But that didn't stop Younger Daughter and Long Suffering Spouse from having a dust-up last night about the upcoming prom.

Two months -- at least! -- before the Big Day and already, apparently, it is the only topic of conversation at Younger Daughter's all-girls school. She's contributed to the down payment on some sort of limo. More money is coming due for tickets. And many of Younger Daughter's friends are planning dress buying expeditions for this weekend.

These facts may have precipitated the discussion, but the conversation quickly zoomed beyond.

Prom, you see, is not just a formal dance where high school seniors on the verge of adulthood dress up like adults and have their first night on the town.

First, adults don't dress up anymore. I love to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers whirl around swanky nightclubs in elegant formal wear... but I don't think I've actually worn formal attire since my wedding.

Second, the kids don't dress up either, especially the girls. Oh, they spend lots of money -- only to wind up looking like the tramps in music videos.

Then there's the "music" -- the profanity-laced "lyrics" celebrating misogyny, crime, casual sex -- and the "dancing" -- well, let's just say that Fred and Ginger wouldn't recognize it as such.

I used to say that prom was a pagan ceremony where any remaining virgins were rounded up and ritually deflowered.

Hmmmmm. Come to think of it, it is perhaps because I gave voice to that theory when I was in high school, over 30 years ago, that I didn't get a prom date.

The passage of time, however, has not substantially softened my harsh opinion of proms.

My kids have all attended Catholic high schools. Single gender Catholic high schools. Even so, they have not been entirely sheltered from the excesses of modern culture. (I have, on occasion, listened to the CD's Younger Daughter has made for the car that she forgets to remove on those rare days when I actually get to drive the vehicle.) My consolation is that my children may have been more sheltered from the common culture than would have been true had they attended a co-ed public high school.

Bad as the "dance" may be, it is the before and after prom activities that really turn prom into a festival of wretched excess. Somewhere, in a more innocent time, someone suggested that the gang all get together the day after the dance for a picnic.

Now, many parents book hotel rooms for their little darlings to do whatever they please after the prom. (No, we won't.) Limos -- or even buses -- are hired so the kids can drink without fear of a DUI arrest. The kids don't go home and then rendezvous the next day for the picnic -- they crash at the hotel and go out for breakfast. Maybe they make it home for dinner the following night.

Fortunately, my two older sons had baseball games on the day after their senior proms. I'm not even certain that Oldest Son went at all. Younger Daughter insists that we let Middle Son stay out all night after another prom that he attended -- and under the inflexible principles of stare decisis we must now agree, supposedly, to let Younger Daughter stay out all night also.

Older Daughter went to her prom. On a blind date. With some peculiar-looking boy whose first name was that of a cartoon character. I never learned his last name, or whether he in fact had one. Long Suffering Spouse thinks I was dispatched to pick them up from a post-prom restaurant after the promised limo failed to arrive. If this is true, I have suppressed the event entirely.

Younger Daughter has no boyfriend, although she has a number of admirers. But this one is expected to take that girl and the other one is still dating someone else, though neither knows why, and there are similar stories for all the rest. It seems quite likely that Younger Daughter will wind up with a 'fix up' date, too.

For this she needs to spend hundreds of dollars on a dress, and hundreds more on a limo and tickets and dinner? (It's her prom -- and this is the modern age -- she'll be expected to pay.) And she wants to stay out all night besides?

It's going to be a long couple of months along the prom battlefront.