What Next?

 RHYS BOWEN:  As I’ve mentioned this week, we are gearing up for a big family wedding. I am debating whether to spend a small fortune on a dress. Because it is going to be A BIG OCCASION.

When my girls got married the weddings were lovely but simple. We had a family friend to do the photos and the video. Another friend provided the DJ at one and the jazz band at another. We had a nice venue, good food and a great time was had by all.

My son and his bride arranged their own wedding. It was in a grove four thousand feet up a mountain and the whole wedding party slept in yurts. It was lovely. Lights strung between the trees, a dance floor, good food and in the middle of nature. I loved it (apart from the bed in the yurt.. .)

This is a wedding with all the bells and whistles. A wedding planner making sure all is in place  before we reach the venue. A bridal procession in which I have to walk with the two other grandmothers up the aisle. A videographer, apart from the photographer. Signature cocktails. You name it, we are having it. 

This makes me realize how much we have to raise the bar to make anything feel special these days. Destination weddings in Tahiti! Photo shoots by the Eiffel Tower. 

 Christmas comes to all the stores in October.  Look at the ads at Christmas time. Put a Lexus under the tree for her. My granddaughters, at a private school, had to endure prom-posals before the prom. Not just “hey, would you like to go to the prom with me?” but balloons, banners, music, dancers etc etc. Lizzy had the embarrassment of an elaborate  very public, promposal from a boy she didn’t want to go to the prom with. But she said yes, not to hurt his feelings after he’d been to so much trouble. 

We were out for a walk a few months ago and there in the park was what seemed to be a big picnic.  Only it had a giant paper mache decoration and as we passed there was music, drum roll, then this exploded, confetti shot everywhere, there were screams and hugs and…. It was a gender reveal party!

What next? I ask myself. Have we lost the ability to be happy with the simple, the non-extravagent? Not over the top, competing all the time? I find myself fantasizing about living in a French or Italian village. Sitting in the town square, drinking coffee or wine with friends.. All the time in the world. No stress. No hype. 

How about you? Do you feel the same?

Promposal?

Me, headed for my prom in 1979

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Along with graduations, May means prom season in high schools across the US (I understand “formal” or “grad” is the term in Canada. The UK, of course, has The Proms, but it’s a whole other thing.) The prom has loomed large in the public imagination for years, of course. It’s been features in more movies than I can count, from horror flicks -think Prom Night and Carrie - to dance fests like Grease and Footloose, to teen empowerment in Never Been Kissed  and Mean Girls. 

The basics have remained the same for close to a century now. Girls dressed to the nines, sometimes in ways that make their elders’ hair stand straight up. Boys in rented tuxedos, which have run to startling colors and fabrics over the decades. Twinkle lights and paper decorations in the school gym/ local event space/ nice hotel. Girls kick off their heels by the third dance. Despite frequently arriving in pairs, kids hang out in gender- and group- defined clusters: there’s all the lacrosse guys, with their bow ties in their pockets, and there are the theater kids, with flowers or fluorescent die in their hair. Some couple breaks up before the night is through. Despite the many cinematic suggestions and the eternal hopefulness of teen boys, very, very few people actually lose their virginity on prom night. It’s far more common to wind up at Denny’s/ Waffle House/ IHoP with a group of friends, dissecting the evening while scarfing down carbs in a quantity only the 17 or 18 year old metabolism can manage.

There’s a new twist for the Instagram age, which comes before prom: the Promposal. In an act of heroic proportions, considering the tender feelings so many teens hide beneath their brash exteriors, one party asks another to come as to prom with decorated cars, signs, clever skits, groups of friends singing - if you can think of it, it’s being done. You know it’s a whole thing, because there are multiple articles in SEVENTEEN and TEEN VOGUE titled “10 Cute Promposals” and “Funny and Romantic Promposal Ideas!”

 

Here’s Celia Wakefield’s younger grandson promposing to his girlfriend, who’s last name is Pacific. (She’s going as his date!) I can only assume these proposals, like the “will you marry me” kind, come with a well-assured “Yes,” because I would die third hand if any of these kids got their feelings crushed.

Reds, what are your prom memories - for you or for youngsters you know?

 

 

HALLIE EPHRON: I only went to one prom, and it was my senior prom. I was seeing a boy who was in college and he and his best friend took me and my best friend. My dominant memory is that in my haste to leave my bedroom and get downstairs to meet him, I caught the lacy skirt on the dooknob and it ripped. A big hole. I went to my one and only prom in a dress held together by safety pins. Sigh.

My daughter’s first prom was when she was a sophomore in high school and a guy she was mad about invited her to his senior prom. They’ve been together ever since.  

RHYS BOWEN:  We didn’t have anything as fancy as a prom but a school dance for the sixth formers. I went with a very nice and suitable boy and had a lot of fun in spite of the teachers standing around the walls glaring at us. 

All of my kids did proms in a big way. John bought Dominic a tux when he was a sophomore and I think he went to every prom in the county for the rest of his school career. Have tux, will travel. There were o prom posals in those days, but there are now. My granddaughter Lizzie had an embarrassing promposal when a guy invited her with great ceremony in front of all her classmates and she couldn’t say no because she didn’t want to embarrass him, but she’d already agreed to go with someone else. I’m not sure how she sorted that one out.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: How did I not know about promposals?? What fun! (Unless they are embarrassing, like Rhys’s granddaughter’s.) It makes me a little sad that I never went to a prom as I had dropped out of high school at the beginning of my junior year. The only dances I went to were at the local rec center, and they were most definitely NOT formal. I don’t remember Kayti’s proms being a very big deal either, maybe because she was at a magnet school with only a few classes at the high school.

JENN McKINLAY: My best friend and I couldn’t find dresses we liked so we decided to make ours – what were we thinking? This was the late eighties, so it was still doable :) and our dates were fine with it. All I remember is trying to finish my Spanish 5 Honors final at the same time I tried to sew my dress, which caused an epic meltdown, and having the single greatest mom on the planet for taking over the tailoring of the dress and finishing it for me so I could write my twenty page Spanish essay. Mercy. I think promposals are awesome. Neither of my dudes did them, opting instead to go to prom with groups of friends, for which I am relieved. 

LUCY BURDETTE: I never went to a prom as I was super shy and we’d moved at the beginning of high school. I was, however, invited to the Snowflake Ball by a kid in my sister’s class. I know I wore a red velvet dress and I definitely know that the corsage was delivered to our house

that afternoon. This was fortunate because it was HUGE, extending

Youngest headed to her prom - 36 years later!

from elbow to fingertips. At least we had time to trim it down. 

 

Promposals? I’m going to be the grumpy Grinch here and say it sounds like more pressure and another way to embarrass kids!

 

JULIA: How about you, dear readers? What are your prom memories - for yourselves and for your kids?