Prom Sucks

Not me. I was hotter than that and my date was shorter.

I need a trophy. I'll have to figure out how to win something so I can get a big trophy. My wife has a big trophy from when she was in a beauty pageant in high school and I'm jealous. Trophies create a sense of self-worth and I need affirmation to be happy. When I won "Mr XX" (XX being the name of my high school) in 1989 they didn't give out a trophy. I think I got free tickets to prom and a limousine ride, but I didn't like my date very much so the whole thing was kind of wasted. I took this girl that I barely knew because I'd broken up with my girlfriend Linda only a few weeks before prom and had to find a date on short notice and by that point all the hot ones were taken. The girl I ended up taking was from a different high school. Linda was from my high school but she wasn't very smart and that was the cause of the end of our love. I was reading this book called "Cultural Literacy" at the time and it said that for any person to be culturally literate they had to know a ton of key facts, figures and dates (like, for example, who is Ronald Reagan, who are the New York Yankees, what is the Brady Bunch, etc) that comprise the bulk of the fabric of American society. The book of course was arguing that people don't know the stuff anymore and so we're going to hell in a handbasket, oh the youth of today, sex drugs and rock n roll, etc. The sky is always falling. The book had seven dates in it that it claimed were indispensable for people to know: 1066, 1492, 1776, 1861-65, 1914-18, 1939-45 and 1984. I'd dated Linda for a few months and had begun to realize she might not be the sharpest tack in the bunch when she told me her favorite artist was Paula Abdul (who, when she first told me this, I thought it was a guy named "Paul Abdul" - this was 1989 and it was all new back then). So I went to Linda and said "Do you know the significance of any of these dates?" and she didn't know one of them. Not one. I could totally understand not knowing 1066, and 1984 was kind of a trick question, but to not know 1492? I was floored. The horror. I couldn't do it anymore but held out as long as I could until I was absolutely certain. A couple of days later we were standing in the main hall/entrance area to the school during lunch and I told her it was over. "It's not you, it's me" I said (I used that one all through college. It worked pretty well). "What about prom?" she said. "I think prom is out," I said. She yelled something and threw an object at me that was small and heavy but kind of soft and then ran away. I think she was crying. I can't remember if I ever talked to her after that or not. I probably did but I don't remember it. I picked up the thing she'd thrown at me when she ran off and it was a brownie. I was glad I'd called it off with Linda until the night of prom when I showed up to my date's house and she looked so bad I just couldn't believe it. I've never been into big make-up and tricked-out hair, caring more for the natural look, and this girl looked liked Tammy Faye Bakker as far as I was concerned (god rest her soul). It was the 80's so it wasn't fair to expect anything else, but I still wasn't into it. So we took photos, which I never saw since digital cameras hadn't been invented, and I took her to prom. We left a little early and I took her home really early. We made out in the car for half an hour or so but I wasn't very interested. The next morning I didn't call her and the day after that also. She went to a different school and that was back in the days without email, cell phones and texting, and girls weren't supposed to call boys as far as my mom was concerned, so I just didn't call her and we literally never spoke again. Not once. I graduated shortly thereafter and left for college and forgot her name. Now I will never find her again because you can't do a Google search without a name. I tried "Girl at prom 1989 Maryland" once but it turned up so many hits that I figured it wasn't worth it. Plus there weren't very many pictures and I need pictures. I'm a very visual person. I was already married and my wife was hotter than that girl on my wife's ugliest day and that girl's best so the whole thing was really just pointless. I'm pretty sure the girl was Jewish so I could have added the word "Jew" to narrow the search results but it wasn't worth trying again. I went and checked ESPN.com instead. When I won the Mr. XX pageant I would have been better off if if they'd have just given me a trophy.