The school Roy teaches at recently had their prom.  All the teachers are invited to go to the banquet before the prom, so we took this opportunity to get all fancy and go out.   Besides showing off how good we look, I wanted to point out a few differences between the prom I remember having as a teen and this prom. The high school I went to had 2,000 students and probably 200 went to the prom each year.  Roy teaches at Revere in Ovid, CO and it's small enough that it combines prom (and a lot of other activities) with Julesburg High School, the only other high school in the county.  Almost every junior and senior was at this prom and if they weren't it was highly noticeable.  I sat between my husband, who grew up in Haxtun, and another teacher, Shelley, who had grown up in Julesburg (where the prom was taking place) and they both talked about planning for their proms, building sets, putting up decorations, yadda yadda.  I never did any of those things because that was the job of the Prom Committee at my school which was made up of a whole different class of kids than me!  Roy and Shelley weren't a part of any special clique that gave them the "in" on prom decorations, there are just so few kids in every class that they all have to take part in helping.

Schools around here have some different rituals than we had.  Like the banquet - we had a meal at our prom, but it wasn't a separate affair.  And kids from a younger class acted as the servers at the banquet and apparently have to dress-up according to the theme each year (Shelley said she was an angel one year).  After the meal there was the Grand March, which my school had, but I have no idea when it was and who was in it.  However, at these schools the Grand March is a very formal parade in which every couple going to prom walks across the floor in front of an audience of community members (I really would have liked to watch that and see all the dresses, but Melise just wasn't in the mood - darn it!).  Then they announced the prom king and queen, which sounded a little awkward because there were only two kids to vote for in some cases - and when I say that, I mean there were only two boys or two girls in that class of kids. 

The very next day, I went out to supper with another couple who live in Julesburg, Gary and Valerie.  I told them about my blog and that I was going to write a little about the prom experience.  It turns out that they both grew up in Denver.  Valerie asked me, "Weren't your proms in hotels?"  Come to think of it, at least one of my proms was in a fancy restaurant.  Revere and Julesburg's prom was in the Julesburg gym - very nicely decorated by the students, of course.  I hadn't really thought about the venue before.  I do recall having a dance at our school's gym and thinking that it still looked like a gym, but having it in a restaurant didn't really make it much more exotic.  I thought the Julesburg gym looked very lovely in dreamy dim blue lighting with streamers, glitter, and such.  I definitely had a moment there were I wished I was 17 again looking for romance on the dance floor . . .