black women center: digging up the past

Jessie recently tumbl’d this ModCloth dress, which I have to say is Utterly Effing Gorgeous, along with the caption “if only I could flashback and wear this to prom!”:

Above, Tiers of a Gown, $64.99 at ModCloth

Given the opportunity to relive my senior prom, I would seize it, stuff a rag in its mouth, tie it to a tree, and threaten it with an instrument of torture artfully crafted from everyday office supplies until it were too afraid to even suggest so horrific a proposition. Because GUYS!, it was that bad.

Well, no, it wasn’t really, because it began and ended with my favorite people, but it was a lot more trouble than it was worth.

You’d think there’d only be a few things to worry about – dress, shoes, bag, hair, makeup, date, transportation – and that at least a couple of them would lend themselves to fun. But nooo, AS FLIES TO WANTON BOYS ARE WE TO THE GODS.

Above, this is not related to what I just said, but it is representative of my feelings about prom.

But now I’ll address these in order of Disaster.

Transportation was taken care of by virtue of my friends and I being too cheap to pay for a bus/limo/helicopter/caravan led by elephants, camels, and other members of an exotic menagerie laden with treasures of the Orient.

My bag ended up being a repeat from my high school’s Senior Boat dance, where we were on a boat (motherfu**er), but it was sort of a mess because my shoes were brown and my bag was black and I was breaking all the rules.

Then there was the makeup. As someone who first learned to apply makeup through her theater group, where the rule was MORE IS MORE, YES, FILL IN SHERWIN’S* EYEBROWS AND HAND ME THE LIPSTICK, STAT, the chances of me failing at doing my own eye makeup were close to 100%.

*Sherwin’s eyebrows were generally not referred to as “forehead caterpillars” (to his face), so you can imagine that the misguided executive order to fill them in only enhanced the Groucho Marx/pre-chrysalis moth effect.

I would like to apologize to the people in the next photos, because I am using these without their knowledge despite most of them being my good friends. In the unlikely event that you happen to be one of the subjects of these incredibly embarrassing photos, stumble across this post, and want them removed, just let me know.

Definitely too much makeup on these girls, even for a theater performance.

Above, we smeared his face in orange lipstick to make him look like an Oompa Loompa. It got messy.

Too much eye makeup, and enough hair product to rival Gavin Newsom. I'm guessing someone had the bright idea of filling in his eyebrows, too. IN THE WORDS OF MISS UNDERWOOD, looks like a cool drink of water, but he’s candy-coated misery. (...If you are reading this, Wilson, I am so sorry, except not really.)

Above, I claim no responsibility for this (except the suspenders).

So, yeah, we might have been a little overenthusiastic with the makeup.

Anyway, this is how my prom makeup turned out:

I ended up looking like a hungover raccoon by the end of the night, not having yet mastered the art of lining only my waterline, and because I was under the impression that I needed really heavy eyeliner to make up for a lack of lipstick.

My hair was also an amateur mess because I had recently gone at it with safety scissors, leaving myself with enough hair to do just about nothing. And as a straight-haired Asian girl, of course I had to curl it. Which resulted in me looking like… Judy Jetson.

Not to mention the weird choice of off-white nail polish.

Above, from the hotel Starbucks, where the barista also decided that "Spenser" was spelled "Vensoo"

Moving on, we have my prom shoes and dress, which were a minor disaster. I had decided to go with a dress cut that usually looks flattering on me, partially because I had too many bodily gripes at the time for anything more revealing, only to discover that 1) my boobs looked like they were way on their way to Mars, 2) I looked like a mom, and 3) the shade of green was made for people less pale than I:

Also, my shoes didn’t fit properly and I completely failed at thinking of a shoe color that would go with my dress and had to (horror of horrors!) settle on a pair I did not love. I didn’t love my dress either. I know I'm exaggerating about how bad this is, but really, I shouldn't have worried so much about Not Looking Like Everyone Else and paid more attention to What I Look Good In.

Finally, The Date. This was a disaster and a half. Without naming any names, I will try to explain with this diagram:

I had knowledge of A, B, C, and E wanting to ask me to prom, but D, with whom I had had a brief might-be-classified-as romantic history, got to me first (and I said yes, and then no), and E continued to make nervous-asking-type overtures even after he found out D had asked and I had said yes, although E was the one I was interested in going with, and I ended up going with no one because it was just too much trouble and D wasn’t really in my circle of friends, even though E had lots of excuses to have conversations with me and made awkward I-want-to-dance advances during prom and was even staying in the same hotel as my friends with his friends afterward, and I ran and hid like the noncommittal maneater I apparently once was, and the point of this all is that PROM IS RIDICULOUS and not worth it and my dress cost $153 and my shoes cost $70, and I would have traded them for these cheaper, better-looking versions in a heartbeat so that at least I’d have more glamorous pictures to look back on: