Prom. When you read that, what happened? Did you twitch? Did you cringe? Mildly salivate? The range of responses to such an innocuous little word would surprise you.
As the American rite of passage, this formal event represents more than the keystone in the slap-dash architecture of youth, more than some date on a calendar page which has long since turned.
Tuxedoes were rented, limousines were ridden, mistakes were made, hazy memories forged and most of the documentation on file was destroyed in order to prevent future blackmail attempts.
Prom stories are similar to the proverbial snowflake; no two are the same, but almost all are chilling. Eventually, someone was going to do the obvious and collect a few teen-angst anecdotes with which we can all compare and contrast our own experiences.
This presents the possible letdown of the reader slogging through a bunch of reheated John Hughes-movie cliché laden memories when theirs was a little more along the lines of "Carrie."
Editor Rob Spillman avoided this pitfall deftly by utilizing writers, America's number one resource for hellish introspection.
"Over the last hundred years," writes Spillman in his introduction, "the prom has become one of America's great cultural touchstones … While the prom wasn't always a multibillion dollar industry, it is safe to say that the psychiatry field has gotten fat on the psychic fallout of prom night."
Whimsy is absent from most of the recollections the authors submitted. Instead there seems to be a collective focus on how such a singular event managed to - for better or (mostly) worse - shape the adult they never knew they would become.
Rachel Resnick tells her central Alabaman prom date the truth about herself ("the Judaism, the foster families, the suicided mother and the rejecting father"), and his reaction makes the scales fall from her eyes, and she never quite recovers.
Gary Dauphin tells of his "first thoroughly dysfunctional and unhappy-making relationship that I would loiter in way longer than I should have, eager to and unable to get out at once."
Samantha Dunn writes that she might have been less disappointed in her Evening in Paris-themed prom (in Las Vegas, New Mexico, circa 1982), had she known that she would grow up to actually live in France, and in Hollywood, and write for magazines, and get thin and find the love of her life.
"Of course, if I had known all of that then, I would also have known about the innumerable failures that went along with France and Hollywood, the divorce and romantic disasters that came in the years before I truly fell in love, the pains and illnesses, bankruptcy, betrayals and deaths of people I loved that would also come along," Dunn writes, continuing to describe the risks inherent in having a good time.
"The prospect likely would have cowed me so much that I would have abandoned my Scruples blueprint and stayed in the relative safety of lot #78. Which means, of course, I would have missed my entire life."
This book never degrades into any sort of intangible, easily dismissible cavalcade of lovesick, hormone laden pratfalls.
If anything, it manages to take a moment from the past and illuminate it through the viewfinder of experience with the ease of talented writing.
Short, sweet and over before you know it, "The Time of Our Lives" is kind of like prom itself. Blink and you might miss it.
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