In which a for(COUGH-COUGH- HACK!) year old person prepares to go to the damn PROM....

Okay, so it has not been a good week at La Escuela de Cornelius, and I am feeling the worse for it, lemme tell ya. So what with the sleep deprivation, and the walking meditation required by Our-Lady-of-Perpetual-Hall-Duty and the blisters which sprout like little flowers in her name, and the not-eating-dinner crap, I am abandoning the Mary Poppins pose I have adopted in lo these last few months to say:

Holy crap!

In a moment of temporary weakness I agreed to revisit that horror of all late-adolescent horrors, the Prom.

Now a bit of flashback without the LSD, because Ms. Cornelius is completely drug free unless you count comfortable amounts of Chateau Thames Embankment: Once, long ago when Disco was barely dead, a young Ms. Cornelius went to her own senior prom. Of course, the gods of laughter, A-cups, and acne decreed I would break up with my skank-meister boyfriend a week before The Event That Every Young Girl Dreams Of, and thus I decided I would be brave and not be deprived of This Rich Experience. So, I went with a group of my friends and their dates, hoping that the thunderhead of chiffon and polyester tuxes would camouflage the fact that the number of hens was out of kilter with the number of scrawny preening roosters in badly fitting cummerbunds. I ended up receiving three count 'em THREE pity corsages (one from Mama, one from Girlfriends, one from said girlfriends' Chivalrous Escorts) until I had more blossoms on me than a damn Rose Bowl float.

So off we went to the Prom, held at the palatial Homebuilders' Association, where we all sat around staring at everyone else until all the girls danced with each other in a circle and swung our copious amounts of Farrah-hair and Aqua-Net around in a circle at each other and the boys body slammed each other until they were bruised because nobody- and I mean NOBODY- can really dance to Joan Jett, April Wine, REO Speedwagon, Rush, and Loverboy. Trust me.

So that was my prom. That, and the fact that I spent much of the rest of the night holding back a few of my friends' Farrah-locks as they did the technicolor yawn and taking the keys away from another friend and driving his sorry can home at 3 am, pretty much sums it up.

And with special memories like that, who wouldn't want to go for a reprise? So now I am about to embark on PROM: the Middle-Aged Sequel. And probably just like American Pie 2 or a spouse of Britney Spears, it just won't work.

So, picture, if you will or even if you won't, a woman about whom one could politely whisper "She's really let herself go, hasn't she?" going to procure some sort of formal attire. I mean, if she was a house, she would be that place overgrown with weeds and an old AMC Gremlin with a flat and a broken taillight covered in red plastic parked in a dirt patch in the yard between the sweetgum tree and the cottonwood. Remember that Our Fair Lady is allergic to shopping and only wears a dress in years that are divisible by 19 if she can help it, and you begin to get the picture. But I don't want to look like a grandma, so I procures meself a demure little black number-- okay, a not-so-little black number but one which hopefully will render me mostly invisible except when I need turn off the Klingon cloaking device to cross my arms forbiddingly over my bosom to deter the sharing of ganja or anything else, gawd-help-us. Add stout undergarments and sensible but slightly kicky sandals which can encase my swollen feet after thirteen hours of standing on them and an unfortunate tendency to lead the other faculty members in the ChaCha Slide while blowing my cheeks out like Dizzy Gillespie, and I think you know what I am describing.

The Prom Chaperone! Yaaaay!

There was an old woman who thought she was Fly. I don't know why. Perhaps she'll die. Oh, my!

Pray for me.