Prom memories

My friend, Loralee (Loralee’s Looney Tunes) wrote a post asking about proms, so I decided to write about a couple of them.

I remember this experience very clearly, but I’m not sure exactly which high school dance involved this incident.  I think it was senior prom of my senior year.  This would have been 1975.  I went to a very large high school in Salt Lake and most of our dances were held in the school gymnasium.  However, every now and then we had them at the rotunda of the state capital building or at Hotel Utah, which was downtown, or other places around the valley.  This particular dance was held at Fashion Place Mall.

First you have to picture the placement of garbage cans in a mall.  These were placed every so often down the center corridor of the mall.  It seems like there were some planters and some benches, etc. and the dancing was going on around and between all these things.  The point is:  the garbage cans were NOT placed against a wall.  This is important to remember.

I went to the dance with my boyfriend, who I will refer to as FirstBoyfriend, who was a fun, talented, sweet, really good person.  We had been dating for a couple of years and had gone to many dances and we enjoyed doing “ballroom” dances together – swing, chacha, polka, waltz, foxtrot, etc.  I was excited about the dance, and I had a new dress and new earrings and new shoes.  I don’t think it ever occurred to us to get our hair “done” for a dance.  We just wore it like we always did.  Same with our makeup.   I do remember that FirstBoyfriend brought me a beautiful corsage and I gave him a boutineer.  (How do you spell that?)  We went out to dinner before the dance, and for the first hour or so we had a great time.  Then the band started to play “Roll Out the Barrel” so we did the polka.  We were laughing and spinning and having so much fun, when suddenly I found myself dancing alone!  I stopped, caught my balance, and looked around in time to see FirstBoyfriend running for one of the garbage cans.  I also saw a couple dancing directly into FirstBoyfriend’s path.  There was no collision, as the dancing couple was on the opposite side of the garbage can.  Just as they danced by, FirstBoyfriend barfed.  Poor guy.   He was being so careful to aim for the garbage can, but he hit the girl as she danced past!  Holy Cow!  The horrified girl hustled herself into the restroom, and as soon as FirstBoyfriend could manage it, he got himself into a restroom.  It turned out that he was really sick, and he felt too awful to drive us home, so I had to drive while he laid in the back seat.  Unfortunately, I already had terrible eyesight at that young age, and I was so vain that I hadn’t worn my glasses that night.  So we went home with him moaning in pain and me squinting and hoping not to hit anything.  Now that was a good time!  🙂