The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Prom Season

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Prom Season

It is prom season now, even though the proms aren’t until June. All the signs are here along with the return of the robin. The phone is ringing with boys planning who to ask, how to ask, and Christopher’s question to me this morning, “What’s the name of the wrist thingy I have to buy the girl? The flower thing?” Tickets are being bought. Texting is nearly constant.

I never knew boys suffred prom agonies. I remember going shopping with some of my friends and tears in the dressing room. I also remember, in the days when phones were still actually connected to walls, taking turns "listening" to make sure when HE called, someone would answer. We had a schedule because I don't think any of us ever considered the idea that HE might call back...who says teens live in the moment?

I didn’t go to my own prom. I was way, way too cool for Beatles music and dorky boys who couldn’t dance. I think the real reason was I lacked any kind of knowledge about proms. One boy asked me, and I was shocked: not that he asked me, but at the thought that someone as obviously cool and nonconformist as me would go to something so uncool and conventional. (Maybe that was not how the rest of the high school saw me, as about 144 of my friends also used the same self-describing adjectives - we conformed to our non conformity)

I was surprised at how nervous he was. He bought me a hot dog on the lunch line. Then he blurted, "Are you going to the senior prom because you can go with me." Who could resist that invitation? We started talking, and he told me that his mom told him he had to ask at least one girl. I think he knew that I would decline both the hot dog and the invitation.

I think my real fear was more along these lines:

and of course:

I am trying to think of YA novels that feature "the prom", and I can't.I'm not counting Carrie as that was too icky. I mean normal prom moments -
it's such a rite of passage, yet it's another area that is oddly absent from YA lit. Are proms "bigger" now than they were when the YA writers were growing up? Or is it that the female authors are terrified that those dresses (and probably their hair do's) will be published somewhere on the Internet? For that reason alone, I am glad that I will get my prom ya ya's vicariously.

8 comments:

Marcia said...: I was never asked to a prom. I guess I was so quiet that I was seen as boring, stuck-up, or both.

I see to remember a prom book, and I'm trying to put my finger on the author. Richard Peck? Laurie Halse Anderson?; Thursday, 11 March, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: I can't place any books, but there has to be at least one prominent prom book (yick - what a phrase)

Quiet types never got asked I've heard. I think you've made up for it since though, Marcia.; Thursday, 11 March, 2010
Jemi Fraser said...: We didn't use the word prom - called them semi-formals. It was a dinner dance at a local hotel. We didn't have kings/queens..., just dinner and dancing. Nothing terribly fancy for clothes either.

It's about the same for my kids now. Not nearly as much stress as probably less than 1/4 of the class goes.; Thursday, 11 March, 2010
K.C. Shaw said...: Ew, 80s hair! I wish I could find and burn all copies of my hair from high school (although it wasn't as bad as some).

I was so out of touch in high school that I don't even remember hearing about the prom. None of my friends went and none of us talked about it. I'm wondering now if my school even held them.; Friday, 12 March, 2010
Marcia said...: "Quiet types never got asked I've heard. I think you've made up for it since though, Marcia."

You mean I got loud? :D; Friday, 12 March, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: Jemi, proms were out around here for awhile; now they seem to be back. I'm not sure why.

And K.C. - that's kind of still South Jersey hair. Only here, it's blond and the folks sporting it are not necessarily female. Sad
sightings...

I'm wondering now if anyone who went to their prom became a writer...a YA writer I mean, not a romance writer.

Lol, Marcia. What I meant was you went on to publish books and be "heard" that way. You became successful; I'm starting to think that's what happened to the promless.; Saturday, 13 March, 2010
Anonymous said...: Big 80's hair--I remember thinking how cool that look was. The smell of hair spray still lingers in my memory.; Monday, 15 March, 2010
Anne Spollen said...: I'm not sure that I've ever seen GOOD prom hair, Medeia. Every time someone shows me their prom picture, I sort of go, "Ooohhh, I remember hair like that..." Not, "Oh, you looked so nice with those wing-like projections sprouting from your temples."; Monday, 15 March, 2010

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***