When I was in High School, Prom was something that my friends and I avoided like the damn plague. Maybe there was an element of fear or insecurity in doing so, a kind of “I’m going to hurt you before you hurt me” mindset at work, but I think we just had an overall aversion to ceremonies in general. Having to get dressed up and behave like civil adults (yes, this is ignoring the debauchery that many, or most, otherwise civil kids tend to engage in after Prom) while listening to shitty top-forty ballads was also a pretty strong deterrent. Too much pomp and circumstance, too few dick jokes.
The thing is, the day of Prom arrives and even if you're not going to go you still feel like you need to do something. Something big. Fun. Maybe the excitement of our classmates was infectious, that feeling of expectation and nervousness becoming an energy in the air that couldn't be avoided. So you create your own excitement.
Such as it is, anyway. On the day of Prom in 1988 our big plan was to take a trip to Nashville. Any big plans we ever came up with tended to involve going to Nashville. I mean, they had record stores there. It may as well have been New York freakin' City to us.
Sure, maybe we could have been more creative. Maybe we could have held an Anti-Prom rally or something. Or maybe one of us should have said "Hey everybody, let's put on a show!" At which point we could have mimed Elton John and Kiki Dee singing "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", like on that episode of One Day At A Time. But all that would have taken a lot of effort. Effort is hard. So I guess Nashville seemed the safest, easiest bet.
On that trip I bought another Meat Puppets record, Up On The Sun. Weird how simply buying a record can end up being such a happy memory. Appropriate, because apart from the haunted, ethereal "Two Rivers", Up On The Sun is a pretty happy record. Go to the music streaming site of your choice and listen to "Maiden's Milk" and try not to break into a grin when the Puppets start whistling in wayward unison.
Up On The Sun replaced Double Nickels On The Dime as the ongoing soundtrack for the next several weeks. It's a summertime record - airy and upbeat, full of images of sun and water and heat, all evoking the band's home state of Arizona, which on the basis of this record seemed to be an exotic, otherworldly place. Even the titles sound summery and fun - "Hot Pink", "Swimming Ground", "Animal Kingdom". Jittery guitars and bouncy rhythms give way to shimmering textures and spaced-out vocals, often within the same song. It's not talked about as often, but it's in the same league as the more celebrated Meat Puppets II.
So that purchase is my enduring memory of Prom 1988. That, and making out on the stairs with Emily during the wee hours of Sheila Richards' after-Prom party, while everyone dozed in front of the television in the basement a few steps below. Periodically someone would get up to go upstairs to the bathroom and have to politely nudge us aside. I'm sure it was really irritating, but I also kind of marvel at our hormone-driven brazenness, and I sometimes wish that it hadn't so fully given way to the polite observation of boundaries that comes with adulthood. Though I guess it would be somewhat unbecoming of forty-something adults to openly make out on the stairway at a party. Depending on the adults in question.
The next afternoon I watched on television as the Houston Astros' Mike Scott, at the time one of the three or four best pitchers on Planet Earth, came within an out of throwing a no-hitter against the Atlanta Braves. I'd never seen a no-hitter up to that point (damn you, Ken Oberkfell!) and ever since then whenever I see a pitcher take a no-hitter into the late innings I flash back to Scott's near-miss on the day after Prom.* I've witnessed actual no-hitters on television since then, but that memory of Scott and his ridiculous split-fingered fastball stands out to me. Probably because I was under the spell of that weird hyper-real, afterglow-ish feeling that you get when you've been up all night in the name of fun.
*Upon doing some research, I've found that this game actually took place on Sunday, June 12, which means either that our school's Prom was held very late in the year - actually pretty feasible given the number of snow days we no doubt had to make up - or my memory is faulty. If the latter is the case, which I would find only mildly shocking, it of course means that nothing I write on this blog can be trusted. At least when it comes to sequence of events. So go forward with wide-eyed acceptance of whole-truth-and-nothing-but at your own risk.
It seems very quaint, I know, but the memory of Scott's unhittable-ness and the Meat Puppets and the stairs at Sheila Richards' house add up to something more than the sum of their parts. And that sum is as glowing and important to me as many people's memories of their own Prom Night. Maybe more so, given all of the horror stories I've heard from people about their own Proms in the years since.
Part of the point of my writing all this stuff about 1988 is to emphasize how it's the mundane moments that sometimes stand out above the big events as memorable. I think I intuitively suspected this was the case back then, which may be part of the reason I avoided things like the Prom. I wanted to invent my own memories, not have them forced on me artificially by some lame, codified tradition.
I recognize now that that outlook is at least partially flawed, that traditions and ceremonies have an important place in organized society. But I still prefer the records, the baseball games and the stairs. Creating new traditions. Is it possible to have it both ways?
