By David Raether
In one of the greatest miracles in human history, I had a girlfriend in high school.
It was my senior year, and she went to a different high school. I mean, come on, no girl from my high school was going to date the doofus I was then. I had to go one high school over to find a girlfriend. We only ever hung out with her friends at her high school because I didn’t want to run the risk of her meeting my friends and them taking her aside saying, “You do realize that Dave is a doofus, right?”
Anyway, this was the early 1970s and my girlfriend was a bit of a hippie. Not the Super-Fun, Hallucinogenic-Drugs, Ecstatic-Dancing-type of hippie girl. She was more of the Making-Her-Own-Cloth-on-a-Loom and Growing-Her-Own-Cucumbers type of hippie girl. How I managed to convince her to do something so utterly American cliché as prom, I have no idea. But I did.
I wanted to look good so I decided to wear what my mother called my “Weddings, Funerals and Piano Recitals Suit.” We got it at Montgomery Wards, so you know it was made from the highest quality polyester available. It had the appropriately wide lapels and flared pants legs that were de rigueur on all suits in the 1970s. For the shirt, I had a white shirt with an ornate floral pattern in blue, and I wore one of my dad’s wide ties. “Look at Mr. Snazzy,” said my grandmother as I walked by her. That was deflating. What high school boy wants to be called Mr. Snazzy by his grandmother? None.
I have totally blown it, I thought, as I went out to the car I was driving for the night – our family's 1969 chocolate brown Pontiac Bonneville station wagon with a little bit of rust over the rear wheel wells. I’m “snazzy,” which, as we all know, is a synonym for Doofus.
I got to my girlfriend’s house and was greeted at the door by her mom, who was a bit stressed out.
“She’s almost ready,” her mom told me. “Maybe a half hour. She’s just about done sewing her dress.”
“She’s sewing her dress?” I asked. “I thought you guys were going downtown to buy her a dress.”
Her mother turned and yelled up the stairs. “I told you we should have bought you a dress!”
Mom stormed upstairs and an argument ensued with lots of yelling and, I think, crying too.
Which left me stuck in the living room alone with her dad and one of her little brothers, who was playing “Greensleeves” on his recorder over and over. Finally, her dad had had it.
“Enough!” he yelled at the brother. Who promptly put the recorder down and joined his father in staring at me.
“What car are you driving?” her dad asked.
“A Pontiac station wagon,” I said. “It’s our family car.”
Long silence with the background noise of yelling and crying.
“What kinda mileage you getting on that thing?” he asked.
“I don’t really know,” I said.
More silence. Finally, I decided to see if I could start a conversation..
“So….” I said. “How about the Twins… huh?
“What about ‘em?”
“They’re doing pretty good so far this year,” I said.
More silence. This is the longest half hour of my life! I thought to myself.
“Do you think I should go and maybe come back in a little while?” I asked her dad..
“I have no idea,” he said.
It seemed like a good idea to me. So I stood up and was heading for the door when her mother announced my girlfriend was coming down the stairs. You know, the classic prom moment. The dress? Not so great. It had all the grace of a pink, cowl-less burqa. But she was my girlfriend and she looked just beautiful to me, so who cares about the dress? Besides, I was hardly James Bond, myself.
As far as the prom went, it was a blast. It was held in a ballroom of an older downtown Minneapolis hotel that had seen better days. My girlfriend’s high school was overwhelmingly Black students, and we were one of just four white couples there. The DJ and the music were fabulous and we danced ourselves into exhaustion. It felt like we were living an episode of Soul Train.
I can only hope your prom turned out to be as much fun as mine did. To get yourself in the mood, here are some movies about prom.
Show of hands: how many of you have seen this movie at least twice? All of you. As I suspected. This movie is a classic of the prom movies subgenre.
Kevin Bacon plays a kid from Chicago who has moved to a small town with his widowed mother and is stunned to learn that dancing is banned in the town. Well, that just has to change, and he shows the town—and its priggish leaders—that dancing is good clean fun for the young people. The whole banning of dancing by the town council may seem a bit implausible. However, my dad’s first job as a high school teacher was in a small town in Wisconsin where dancing was banned at the high school. Which effectively banned dancing in the town because it’s not as if there were other venues for dancing. So, yeah, this sort of thing used to be real.
There are two things that make this movie work: Kevin Bacon and Kenny Loggins’s theme song that I just really don’t like at all but cannot get out of my head right now. Kevin Bacon, on the other hand, is not annoying, and is, in fact, utterly charming. He really makes this movie soar because of his commitment to the role. He just completely throws himself into a film and a script that are banal at best. Plus, he saves prom!
John Lithgow is the Cotton Mather-esque preacher who doesn't want those kids doing any of their crazy lust-inducing dances. Herbert Ross directed. Please, Louise. Pull me off of my knees. Arrrgh! That song gets stuck in your head. Time for all of us to watch this movie again. By the way, Loggins’ song was not the one from the movie that was nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar. That was Let’s Hear It For the Boy, performed by Deniece Williams. Hah! Take that Footloose. So… Jack, get back, come on before we — Oh, no! I’ve done it again. Please, Kenny Loggins, make it stop!
First things first: this is an excellent movie. Secondly, it has one of the best soundtracks of all time, right up there with the soundtrack of American Graffiti (1983), Saturday Night Fever (1977), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and the great reggae soundtrack for the Jamaican film The Harder They Come (1972). The soundtrack to this movie is jam-packed with great 1980s New Wave music. Contributing to the soundtrack were The Psychedelic Furs, Suzanne Vega, Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark, INXS, Echo and the Bunnymen, and The Smiths, among others. But hold on here. I’m supposed to be writing about this as a movie.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s excellent. John Hughes wrote the screenplay to this lovely comedy/drama about an awkward girl (Molly Ringwald) and her romantic entanglements leading up to senior prom. Hughes was one of most accomplished screenwriters of all time, having written such marvelous comedies as National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1984), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), and Home Alone (1990), among many others.
This isn’t just a lighter-than-air teen comedy. It has some dark corners and is exceptionally well-acted. The cast also includes Harry Dean Stanton, Jon Cryer, Annie Potts, and James Spader. Howard Deutch directed. If it’s been awhile since you’ve seen the movie, time to reacquaint yourself.
The first of two excellent prom movies that came out in 1999, this one is a modern reworking of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Let’s set aside the misogynistic elements of Shakespeare’s play for a moment. No wait, let’s not. The basic idea of the story in the original play is that a young woman who doesn’t go along with what others have planned for her is a shrew who must be “tamed.” Hmm… It’s a pretty terrible concept for a play. And yet, it is still a play that gets updated. It was the basis of the 1948 Cole Porter musical Kiss Me, Kate. The 1980s detective show/romantic comedy Moonlighting also did an episode in 1986 called Atomic Shakespeare that was based on the play.
So how does this movie update this story to an amusing tale of high school romance? All credit here to the screenplay written by the writing team of Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith, who also co-wrote Legally Blonde (2001) and Ella Enchanted (2004). The way they pull it off is pretty clever. The action of the film centers on the efforts of a new kid in town (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to get a prom date with Larisa Oleynik’s character, Bianca Stratford. The only way she can go out with him, according to her strict father’s rules, is if her older sister, Kat (Julia Stiles) goes out with her on a double date. Patrick, a dreamy but “dangerous” boy from Australia (Heath Ledger), is wrangled into being Kat’s date, despite her lack of interest in him. It’s all just a tremendous amount of fun.
The cast is marvelous and includes the comedian Larry Miller as the father. Miller has one of my favorite jokes ever in his standup routine: “I’m getting to that age in life where I don’t buy green bananas anymore.” It’s what we used to call “a thinker” because it takes a couple of steps to get the joke. Gil Junger directs—a television director with a perfect touch for comedy.
A modern teen comedy reworking of George Bernard Shaw’s classic play Pygmalion, which had earlier been turned into My Fair Lady (who can forget the 1964 film version with Audrey Hepburn?). While She’s All That got mixed reviews when it was originally released, it ended up being the biggest teen movie of the 1990s. With the passage of time, it has been reassessed and is now a well-loved movie about high school and prom. Freddie Prinze, Jr. plays Zack, a popular boy at a Southern California high school who gets dumped by his girlfriend just six weeks before prom. At the urging of a friend, he decides to prove he can make any girl acceptable to popular high school society by teaching her the ropes of being cool. He picks a surly art student as his Eliza Doolittle, if you will.
There’s plenty of mean-spirited high school conniving here, along with a genuinely adorable romance. This movie is just irresistible. It also features what is probably the best prom dance scene ever in the movies—the kids all dance to Fatboy Slim’s The Rockafeller Skank. It’s simply a glorious number. The cast includes Rachael Leigh Cook, the late Paul Walker, and Matthew Lillard. The film was directed by Robert Iscove from a screenplay by R. Lee Fleming, Jr.
If you’ve ever been to Sacramento, California, you might have not regretted it. Or remembered it. It’s the third-largest metropolitan area in California, checking in at 2.8 million people. It’s the state capitol, and all in all, is a fairly nice place. Yet, you never really hear any Dad say to his family: “Pack your bags, everyone! We’re going to Sacramento!” This astonishingly good comedy/drama/coming-of-age story is about a high school senior at a Catholic high school in Sacramento who just cannot believe how lame her parents are and how lame everything is in Sacramento. Get me out of here! And then she meets a boy and falls in love and that ends…and there’s another super cute boy who she really likes, but he turns out to be a huge disappointment.
Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf star in one of the truest portrayals of a mother-daughter relationship working its way through the teenage years. Metcalf was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance here. The scene where the two of them are in a thrift shop shopping together for a prom dress for Lady Bird is worth watching over and over.
The film was written and directed by Greta Gerwig. Gerwig is one of my favorite American filmmakers. She’s a prodigious talent as a writer and actor and, lately, director. She also directed Little Women (2019). I worked with Laurie Metcalf for four and a half years on Roseanne, and her talent is on full display here. Man, she’s good. I always marveled at it on Roseanne, and even more so here. The movie ends with Lady Bird leaving Sacramento for college in New York City. Sacramento at this point in the story no longer seems quite so lame but is instead a rich, full place with its own kind of beauty from which Lady Bird can create her own life.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.