A Ritzy Affair, Indeed

Everybody has or will have a Prom Night Story. This is mine.

On Saturday, April 24, 2004, I came home from the regional UIL science competition somewhat shaken. I was expecting to deal out major pwnage in the biology portion and do pretty well on the chemistry, tanking the physics. What really happened was a bit different. As expected, I tanked the physics, mainly because the physics program at Georgetown High School wasn’t worth a damn until the year after I graduated. The bio was an absolute shocker: I was trounced. Too many questions about endocrinology, which was one of my weaker areas at the time. I was in a three-way tie for second in the chem, though, so the day wasn’t entirely lost.

I came home shaken, not so much by the day’s battle as by what I was going to do that night. That’s right, as implied earlier, it was Prom Night. My own efforts to attempt to get a date could be described as flimsy at best (needless to say they failed; I never had much luck with the ladies in high school what with being handsome, intelligent, gentlemanly, and carless) and I had been too proud to try to get someone to set me up; nevertheless, I had in my possession a ticket that felt like a grain of dirt under a hard contact lens.

This was thanks to my Spanish teacher, who saw in me something I never did see and still can’t identify to this date. On Monday, she had cornered me during the period of time after the lecture and asked me what my plans for Saturday were, and I said that I would probably come home from Regionals and cry myself to sleep.

“What if you had a magic piece of paper that could get you in?” she asked in the manner of a fairy godmother.

“Magic paper... oh,” I said. “I can already get my ticket free on account of my fundraiser participation last year. It’s just that I can’t go stag to the prom, can I?”

She then proceeded to relate the tale of how in her senior year, her boyfriend had dumped her shortly before the prom and how she ended up going with a friend who later turned out to be a lesbian, concluding, “But at least I have a story. If you don’t go, you won’t have a story; you won’t be able to look back on it years later and laugh at how stupid it was.”

On my way out the door at the end of the class, she slipped me an envelope containing a ticket with my name on it.

Anyway, all week, I had been pondering the events of those five minutes or so. On my way home from Regionals, I had discussed the situation with my friend Ben, who had been set up. His opinion was that I should go stag.

At home, I explained the situation to my parents, whose recommendations I followed. A little before midnight, I was honored with the designation of Best Dressed according to a poll taken a few weeks in advance. I still have the stupid little resin brick to prove it.

I picked up the brick the following week. While I wasn’t receiving it, I was dancing to cheesy electronica with an assortment of college girls. The college guys in the Ruta Maya were too busy standing around getting rat-assed to give a rat’s ass.

Later early Sunday morning, my parents and I walked through the door of the Continental Club, where a blues/rockabilly group called the LeRoi Brothers was playing. As we were paying the cover, singer Toni Price was finishing a set with them. My folks went into the back of the club and left me up front where the band was playing. In retrospect, the band was mediocre, but compared to the DJ I had experienced earlier, they were quite good. At about 2:30, I was approached on the dance floor by none other than an appreciably inebriated Toni Price. Her speech moderately slurring, she asked me, “Are you Johnny Depp?”

At the time, this threw me for a bit of a loop, but I later recalled that in the previews for Secret Window, Depp had looked kind of like me.

“No,” I said, thinking, Oh my god, she is tanked.

“Good!” said Price, taking longer to pronounce the “G” than the “ood”. I often wonder what would have happened had I said that I was Depp. She asked me my name; I answered; she said, “I’m Toni.” Indicating the band, “They rock, don’t they?”

“Yeah,” I said.

At that time, this potentially awkward situation of a sleep-deprived high school senior being chatted up by a drunken blues singer (there’s a strange joke in that somewhere; I know there is) was cut short by the interruption of my even more sleep-deprived parents. I often wonder what would have happened had they not rescued me.

So, um... yeah. My Spanish teacher can now rest assured that I've got a story.

Expect another update on the next cold night in the private hell of my mind.