If You Read it on the Internet, it Must be True... Right?

Ah, prom season; it's here again, like it or not. Whether you're on the "like it" side or the "not" side will likely depend on your age and gender.
 
I always wanted a gorgeous, romantic prom night. Then I got to be old enough to actually attend a prom, and realized that my chances at "romantic" were slim to none. I gave up the fantasy pretty easily, with no depression or weeping. Plus, I ended up with a great senior prom story that included my best friend, her debate partner, a sports car, McDonald's and a freshman in drag. (See "Prom Memories", my post on 6/17/11.)
 
For the most part, my kids attended formals with friends, some opposite gender, and some same gender. My oldest shopped for hours; my second bought the first dress that fit her.
 
My second daughter's senior prom date is undoubtedly responsible for an Internet rumor that will come back to bite somebody on the butt some day. "Chris!" I said, when he put a comment on his MySpace. "You can't say that! People will believe you!"
 
"No, they won't," he said. "They know I'm kidding."
 
"No! They don't! Trust me!"
 
He laughed.
 
 I wasn't angry with him, and he wasn't spreading false rumors of sexual conquest – far from it. I was simply sure that he was vastly underestimating the average person's ability and willingness to believe the outlandish, especially when it involves religion and sex.
 
Terry, my daughter, had a beautiful sky blue gown with beading. It was sleeveless, so I took material from the matching shawl that she didn't intend to wear and used it to make cap sleeves. On the day of the prom, she went to her cousin Sarah's house so that Sarah could do her makeup. The theme was "Arabian Nights," and Sarah does exotic so much better than we could have done it at home.
 
Sarah's meticulous, but not very speedy, so it took longer than we'd anticipated. Even though Sarah only lived a few blocks away, Terry was running late. She ran upstairs to put on her dress, and in her haste she popped the zipper.
 
It didn't just jump off the track or lose its pull tab – it wrenched loose with such force that the entire sliding mechanism flew off the dress, taking a number of zipper teeth with it. It was low on her back too, leaving the entire back of the dress gaping open. There was no way that the dress would zip up.
 
Chris stood downstairs waiting while we stared at the dress. They were already likely to be late for their dinner reservation, and Terry's dress was almost unwearable.
 
I ran downstairs and grabbed the thread that was the same color as the dress, a needle, and Chris. I sat on the toilet and sewed up the back of the dress while Terry chatted with Chris, who found the whole thing amusing. Luckily, the stitching was almost invisible on the blue nylon zipper. They were only slightly delayed, and went off to have a grand time.
 
Our church has an unspoken tradition that encourages kids to wear their formalwear to church the day after a formal dance, so that everyone can ooh and aah over them. Terry was so tired when she got home from the prom that she fell into bed without getting cut out of her dress. I was sure that it would be too mussed and rumpled to wear in the morning, but I was wrong.
 
I have no idea how she did it, but Terry slept in one position, on her back, all night long. Even her hair and makeup barely needed touched up. She looked marvelous. I would have looked like I'd been shoved in the trunk of a car for a week.
 
Chris, who does not belong to our church, told everyone that the whole thing was a religious ritual, that our church required girls to be sewn into their formals to make sure they stayed on all night. He embellished it even further – "Then, they have to sleep in the dresses and go to church and show the bishop the next morning, so he can see that they left it on all night. That way he knows they weren't having sex." If they didn't do these things, there would be church disciplinary action taken, he told people.
 
He did not believe me that people would take him seriously.
 
"For one thing, I mean, it's a dress. The skirt goes up," he said. Obviously, leaving a dress on does not mean that no sexual activity can take place. That alone would make it obvious that he was joking, he was sure.
 
I am not so sure. I think that somewhere, someone is convinced that Chris was telling the truth. "I actually know someone this happened to!" they'll say.
 
If you ever hear someone tell you such a story, even if they insist that it's absolutely true, now you'll know where and how the story started.
 
It was just haste and a cheap zipper, folks, not a religious ritual or requirement. I promise.
 
Before Terry wore the dress again, I used more of the shawl material to sew a flap to one side of the back opening, then put ribbon loops and lacing up the back. It looks great, it allows for weight gain (or loss), and there's no zipper to break.
 
No, lacing does not count as being sewn in. I'm telling you, that's a rumor!

Out of the Dark

I always figured that I'd pretty much breeze through the physical signs of aging. When a friend despaired to me that, "Heads don't automatically turn when I walk into a room anymore," it was all I could do not to snort. I did say, "Welcome to the real world!" Heads have never turned when I walk into a room. Not only do 99% of my male friends not see me as female, a good portion of my female friends don't, either. I am gender neutral. This is totally OK with me. It weeds out the shallow men who don't want to talk to you unless they're hoping to have sex with you, as well as the catty, plastic looking Barbie women who are afraid that ordinariness is contagious.

Gray hair and wrinkles? Pfffttt. I earned these. Besides, I have NO desire to look ridiculously artificial.

Weight gain terrified me at 15, annoyed me at 25, and has since dropped totally off my radar. (Save the comments about how, "I can tell." It is not my job to impress anyone.) I have never been on a diet or purchased a weight loss product. This makes me a distinct minority (and horrifies some folks); I can live with that.

Not being fashionable? Please! First, you don't generally miss what you never had. Second, trends are short lived, superficial, contradictory and driven by the need to 1. make somebody money and 2. feel superior. Being fashionable now means being out of fashion in the future; it's a never ending cycle. If you're me, you're still happily wearing pants you bought 10 years ago, and you have no 1980s MC Hammer pants in your past.

I watched my mother breeze through menopause like it was a total non event, and was glad I'd inherited her genes. I'm hoping I'll have the same luck.

I found myself in my teens and already planning for what I would do if arthritis hit. So far, it hasn't; so much for being prepared.

I was prepared for night blindness, I thought. I'd watched my mother and my older friends first stop driving distances at night, then stop driving after dark, period. I expected it to come on gradually, though, and probably after 50.

It hit without warning, in my late 30s, in the middle of a nighttime drive down a two lane highway in the middle of nowhere. I could not quite figure out what was happening. I had a sinus headache, the kind that pushes on the backs of your eyeballs, so I wondered if the congestion was bad enough to pinch off the optic nerves. I had never noticed any kind of trouble, strain or squinting, and suddenly I was unable to see, at 75 MPH.

If you've ever driven between Reno and Las Vegas on Highway 95, you know how much space is out there. You can go for hours between one stoplight towns. We'd left Reno when my husband left work, about 3:00 in the afternoon, hoping to make Vegas before we stopped for the night, on our way to Phoenix. We had a loooong way to go, and I couldn't see.

My husband was coming off seven days straight of 12 hour shifts, and had told us at 3 that he didn't feel up to driving. My oldest daughter was with us, but she hated driving our Suburban in town, in broad daylight. I couldn't imagine her tackling hours in the dark.

I kept slowing down until I was going about 45 MPH.  My husband would snap at me, "You can't go that slow! Someone will come up behind us and smash into us! You're going to kill us!" I'd snap back, "I can only see about 5 or 10 feet in front of me!"

Maddeningly, he'd say, "That's all you need to see!"

"At 75 miles an hour?"

"What's most important is what's directly in front of you. Do you think the road is going to disappear?" he asked. He never quite "got" my thought process until a couple of years later, after many similar conversations, when I asked, "When you walk into a familiar dark room, like our living room, do you run full speed through it, assuming that you'll know where everything is?" Then, it finally made some sense to him, but is still at odds with one of his firmest convictions, the idea that slowing down on a freeway or highway is unacceptable under all but the rarest and most extreme of circumstances. He's also sure that any kind of hesitation, or being unsure of anything while behind the wheel, is a perilous thing.

Making things worse was the constant stream of oncoming traffic, mostly semis. Cars passing in the opposite direction were aggravating, with their headlights starbursting in my field of vision, but in my Suburban, I am at almost the exact height of the headlights of semi trucks. Their lights were right in my eyes and obliterated my vision for about a full second, even when I kept my eyes fixed on the opposite side of the road, toward the shoulder on my side. A second doesn't sound like a very long time, until you count it out, saying, "one one thousand." Imagine that at highway speed, and you'll understand why it freaked me out.

Needless to say, my husband and I were both at our wits end on this particular drive.

When we hit the next town, we stopped for dinner and got a hotel room as well. None of the adults in the car felt capable of driving, and no one wanted to end up as roadkill.

I couldn't make up my mind on that trip whether this was a temporary or permanent thing. It seemed so sudden and so complete - I'd expected age related night blindness to sneak up on me.

It soon became clear, though, that this was my new reality. I can drive all right in town, where everything is lit, but forget highway driving after dark. My depth perception is also completely unreliable in the dark. I can't reliably recognize curbs, for instance. Pushing my elderly mother in a wheelchair at Disneyland, I ran the chair off the curb and dumped my mother out onto the ground, where the wheelchair fell on top of her. My middle daughter stepped in - "Give Grandma to me! Just give her to me!" I was relieved of further wheelchair duty as soon as dusk approached every day for the rest of the trip.

Mostly, I function without falling or wreaking havoc. I run my hands along a lot of walls, though.

I didn't think much about how I would cope backstage; it never really occurred to me that it might take some adjusting. I've spent pretty much my whole life onstage or backstage - it feels as comfortable as my own home. Then I found myself backstage in the dark on the world's largest indoor stage.

I was playing a chorus part in the Disney version of "Beauty and the Beast." I'd wanted to be Mrs. Potts, but hey, so had every other actress too old to play Belle. Anymore, I only take chorus parts if it's a show that I'm really passionate about, and this one fit the bill.

It was performed in the Grand Theater at Reno's Grand Sierra Resort. The stage was built back when the building was the MGM Grand, and it's impossible to describe how enormous it is if you haven't been on it. Normally, everyone has to whisper in dressing rooms, but these are so far back that you can hold normal conversations, and even laugh, and not be heard onstage. There's usually several rows of thick velvet drapes across the backstage area between the dressing area and the performance area. A 727 airplane, left over from the first show produced in the space ("Hello, Hollywood, Hello!") sits permanently backstage, along with a sweeping staircase, huge columns and other set pieces.

At several points, I had to cross behind the set, which has never been a big deal before. Suddenly, it was. I had to follow someone else, or creep along with my hands out in front of me like a ridiculous cartoon.

During one performance, I was making my way from stage right to stage left, headed eventually to the dressing room. I thought I knew where I was going, and I blundered into some of the ropes used to secure the drapes. This is a huge, huge no-no. I wasn't hurt, and I didn't goof anything up, but it underscored for me how much I could screw up by wandering around blind.

I put my hands out in front of me and crept along with tiny steps. The show had a huge cast, with performers as young as 8, and I nearly ran into one of the children in the cast. I apologized for my clumsiness. "I just ran into the ropes too," I whispered. "I can't see in the dark."

A tiny voice came out of the dark at about my chest level. "That's OK. You know me. Take my hand."

I couldn't see the offered hand, but I held mine out. A small hand grasped it, and led me gently through the dark. As soon as I could see the lights of the dressing area, my guide said, "I've gotta go," and scurried off back into the dark behind me.

I was almost absurdly grateful. Unfortunately, I couldn't find my benefactor and say, "Thank you," since I couldn't even be sure of the child's gender or age, much less identity. It was a kindness I couldn't repay in any way. We had a cast of over 100, many of them children or teens - it could have been any one of dozens of pint sized actors. It's a delight to work with responsible kids, just as it's a headache to deal with the opposite.

I'm usually pretty good at admitting when I'm out of my depth. Unfortunately, I'm more comfortable continuing to blunder along than I am asking for help. I don't feel I have anything to prove; I just dislike having to count on anyone else. "If you want something done right..." and all that jazz. (Yes, it is entirely possible that I have trust issues.)

Sometimes, the universe sends you unmistakable messages. This one reminded me that there are times when someone, even someone unlikely, will have my back. It reminded me that there are times when I'd be an idiot not to ask for help. It also reminded me that, occasionally, even if you don't ask for help, it will appear out of the dark and guide you through.

Sometimes, we all hear the equivalent of that small voice in the darkness, and we can take comfort knowing that we'll be well cared for (even if we really aren't sure by whom or how). As I get older, there will undoubtedly be many more of those moments, both literal and figurative. At those times, I'll think back to the gratitude I felt at that moment.

"It's OK. You know me. Take my hand."