PROM
Isn't it romantic, merely to be young on such a night as this.
--Lorenz Hart
Ask the current seniors what is the most important day coming up, and most of them will tell you it's prom. Graduation is a big event, and so is going off to college, but right now, it's prom. Gowns, nails, hairdos, limos, tuxedoes-eavesdrop on a senior's conversation and you will hear talk of one or all of these topics. With a room full of seniors obsessed with their own upcoming prom, I have a ready audience for the tale of mine and the lessons to be learned from it.
To prepare them I have to take them back to June 1965, to a world they know only from history books, television shows like The Wonder Years, and relics like me. Some of you will remember when gasoline cost 26.9¢ a gallon. Milk was 25¢ a quart, and bread was 19¢ a loaf. First-run movies cost a dollar, and a bottle of Emeraude perfume, the trendy and much-appreciated choice among the girls in my crowd, was under two. Telephone calls and candy bars both cost a nickel--to this day I still speak of nickel Hershey bars, even though they now cost half a dollar. The minimum wage was a dollar an hour, and that's what I earned at the convenience store where I worked after school.
The differences between then and now were certainly more than economic. I think my high school, in suburban New York, was typical of most in that we tended to be a couples-oriented population. Going steady was the big thing. Starting with our arrival in tenth grade, actually continuing from our junior high days, we paired off and "went together" as a routine. Weekend parties and school dances were usually attended drag--not in clothing of the opposite sex, but as couples, as opposed to stag, which meant alone. No one went anywhere stag.
Though couples formed and dissolved with ease and equanimity all through tenth and eleventh grade, by the senior year one's choice of a steady was a more serious matter. Prom lay ahead, and no one wanted to be without a date. To assure ourselves that we1d be going to prom with someone we wanted to go with, we lined up our dates early. By late January or early February the majority of couples were formed for the duration. Hardly anyone broke up during the winter and spring, because if they did, there was no telling who'd be available for prom, and nobody wanted to be in the position of having to choose from among those nobody else wanted either.
How important was it to go to prom? In a graduating class of 454, I'd estimate that over 400 went. Those who didn't fell into two groups--those who didn't attend our prom because they were going with someone from a different school, and so attended that person's prom instead; and those few who would have gone but had no one to go with. Girls who hadn1t been asked out anywhere else were asked to go to prom. Boys who had never had a date before in their lives asked girls to go to prom. Those few who, sadly, couldn't get a date were in a very small minority. For us, like for the kids I teach, prom was the reason to go on living.
My date was to be the girl I had gone steady with since the last weeks of our junior year. As couples were regrouping all through the fall, we continued our relationship, knowing that our romance would last forever. The popular songs of the day assured us of that. But by spring we weren't so sure. Like most teenagers, we were too young and too immature to maintain a relationship for such a long time. We didn't dislike each other, and we weren't eager to break up, but we were getting tired. If not for prom, we probably would have parted company long before we did.
Schools in New York let out at the end of June, after the State Regents Examinations were given. Prom in my school was a month earlier, on the Thursday before the Memorial Day weekend. All seniors were dismissed from school at noon that day so we'd have time to get ready. The girls had to get their hair done and the boys had to pick up their tuxedoes and their dates' corsages. We had to wash our cars, and we were supposed to take naps! Our teachers warned us that we'd be up very late, and wouldn't it be a shame if we were too tired to have a good time. Give me a break, Miss Bruni!
The dance was Thursday evening, and Friday was a day seniors did not have school. It was designated as Senior Appreciation Day, and after nearly thirty years I realize that it was our absence our teachers appreciated. Then came the weekend, and Monday was Memorial Day. In addition to that, we had no school on Tuesday because our school calendar included three days for snow closing in the winter. Since we had used only two of them, the remaining day was added onto the long weekend. That meant that we'd leave school at noon Thursday and not return until Wednesday morning. Such was my senior prom.
We had worked as a class for three years to raise money that would defray the cost of the prom. By spring the cost of tickets was down to $18 a couple, but look at what we got for those eighteen dollars: the exclusive use of the ballroom at a local country club on Thursday night, about three hours of hors d'oeuvres and open soft-drink bar, a sit down dinner at midnight, three live entertainers from New York, dance music till dawn, and free use of the club's tennis courts, golf course, and pool on Friday. At the door of the country club was a large sign proclaiming IF YOU LEAVE NOW YOU MAY NOT COME BACK. The legal drinking age in New York was eighteen, so many of us were old enough to drink legally. But the problems of drinking and driving were with us then too; the school's administration did not want to deal with anyone going out, getting drunk, and coming back to ruin the party. To the best of my knowledge, no one left during the whole night.
Seniors at my school were required to take a course in public speaking, and one unit of that course dealt with social graces. Shortly before the prom, we were all instructed in the etiquette of the evening. This unit included material most of us had never had to think about before--how to make small talk with your date's father, who in many cases was someone you'd managed to avoid ever meeting before; how to introduce your date to the principal's wife; how to eat dinner when you're wearing elbow-length gloves--but material which proved useful during the evening. It also instructed us on the proprieties of formal attire. Few of the girls had ever worn full-length gowns before, and equally few of the boys had ever worn tuxedoes. The girls were encouraged to practice walking in long skirts and high-heeled shoes. The boys were taught that they were to choose one of the two acceptable colors of tuxedo jackets: black or white. We were not to order or to wear powder blue, peacock blue, turquoise blue, electric blue, midnight blue, or any other shade of blue, green, yellow, red, or violet that the men's shops might advertise. And certainly not Madras plaid. Black or white. Our bowties and cummerbunds were to be black, as were our shoes and socks, and, if we wore them, our suspenders. Rebel that I was, I declared my individuality by renting a Madras cummerbund.
Arriving at the prom we were greeted by a breathtaking sight. The girls were lovely, every one in a different gown and every one with a beautiful coiffure that piled hair on her head and added elegant inches to her height. And all the boys were handsome in their black and white tuxedoes. I couldn't believe that these were the same slobs I went to school with every day. We had been transformed that night from the awkward and, frankly, gauche teenagers that we were into a room full of smartly dressed, distinguished looking, debonair young gentlemen and ladies. It was a sight to behold. We were met by a receiving line, and I introduced my girlfriend to my principal's wife, who passed our names along to the other people in the line--the superintendent and Mrs. Intendent, our class advisor and her husband, the School Board president and his wife, our class president and his date. Having been received, we entered the rotunda and began the evening we had been waiting for.
We danced, we ate, we had an elegant evening. Our entertainment consisted of three night club acts from New York. The first was a calypso singer named Steve DePasse, who had appeared often on The Ed Sullivan Show. His act was to improvise calypso songs on topics we gave him. Our job was to try to think of topics he couldn't deal with on the spur of the moment. The Statue of Liberty, seventh period study hall, the formula for the gross national product, even our elderly German teacher, whom we had nicknamed The Walking Death, became the subjects of his song. We howled with laughter. The second was a folk song group called the Highwaymen, whose hit record "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" had been on the charts the year before. Folk music was very big, and we could have had Peter, Paul, and Mary, except that they cost $20,000. Our third entertainer was the comedian Nipsey Russell, whom we still see now and then on Hollywood Squares. Dinner was served to us at midnight, and our dance band played into the wee hours.
Around five o'clock we began to go home to change our clothes (the tuxedoes had to be returned on Friday), reconvening at the country club in casual attire for breakfast. At this breakfast we were treated to two more entertainments. Paul and Larry had taken movies during our three years of high school. They chose the prom breakfast to show them. How embarrassing, in front of our dates, to see ourselves as twerpy sophomores, wearing funny clothes and hair styles, and acting in the goofy way we did. But that was not nearly as embarrassing as it would be twenty years later at our class reunion, when Paul and Larry brought out the old movies again and showed them in front our spouses, from whom we'd all worked so hard to hide the family albums and home movies! They also bestowed awards on members of the class. In the fall we had voted on what we called our Senior Superlatives--the boy and girl who were best looking, most athletic, most likely to succeed, and so on. By the time the
yearbooks came out in June, we had all changed our minds, and the couple voted Romeo and Juliet had broken up; so Paul and Larry chose other awards that didn't appear in our yearbook, awards which they assured us would not be so quickly outdated: Most Unlikely to Hold Down a Job, Least Able to Fill Out a Sweater, and the most damning of them all, Romeo and Romeo. Humor in poor taste is a staple of adolescence, and with the film and awards, breakfast ended and we began the day.
Though we had the use of the grounds for the day, my group (six couples who hung around together--and I must say that those five fellows who were my best friends then are still my friends now, though we are spread out all over the country), my group chose to go to the beach. Memorial Day is traditionally the opening of the beaches in New York, and when you're young you don't care if the water is only 52°. We spent the day in the sun, and that night one of the girls had a party. Saturday we returned to the beach, and Saturday night we went into New York for an evening of theatre.
We had ordered tickets for a Broadway musical, What Makes Sammy Run, starring Steve Lawrence. They cost five dollars. Our plan was to be chic and have dinner after the show, and then return home. (There's a good story here in how Alex came to throw his souvenir pineapple at a woman on the subway platform, but I'll have to tell that one another time.) We got home at around five. The sky was growing light, and as I pulled up in front of my girlfriend's house, her mother leaned out the window and asked did I have any idea what time it was. Well, I was raised to be polite. I looked at my watch and told her it was nearly five. She went on to ask if I didn't think that perhaps we had seen enough of each other over the past few days. Her daughter would be spending Sunday at home, catching up on her sleep. I can't say I was disappointed. If we had been tired of each other's company before the prom, we had really exhausted our resources by now. So on Sunday I returned to the beach, and she stayed home. Sunday night was another party, and Monday was Memorial Day. I really wanted to go to the beach, but I had to march in the Memorial Day parade, wearing a woolen marching band uniform, carrying and playing a twenty-six pound baritone horn over a two mile parade route, all on about six hours of sleep over the past four nights. But it was back to the beach that afternoon, and to another party that night. Tuesday's agenda? Another day at the beach, and another party that night. Somewhere in there my girl and I officially broke up, neither of us devastated, both of us relieved. And on Tuesday night, around eleven o'clock, prom, which had begun at eight the Thursday before, ended.
We returned to school on Wednesday morning shattered. And here is the part I try to emphasize to my students. Before the prom we had been kids. Our parents and teachers had set clear limits on our world, and at the age of seventeen or eighteen, we were still capable of getting excited, feeling awe, finding ourselves in situations we weren't really ready to handle (I doubt Alex would throw the pineapple today), being young. Getting the car was a treat, not an expectation. Money was hard to come by. I spent over $125 on the prom, money I had earned at the excruciating rate of a dollar an hour. I wore my first tuxedo. From beginning to end, the whole experience was a succession of firsts. But for prom, our teachers and parents, who had kept us in check before that time, stepped aside and let us join the adult world for the better part of a very long weekend. I came and went on my own schedule. I had the car. I was responsible for all my decisions. The adults on the receiving line treated us like adults. The teachers who attended the prom allowed us, for that evening, to be their social equals. I danced with Miss Bruni! I held her hand and put my arm around her waist!
But on Wednesday morning, Miss Bruni was again my teacher. She, like all the others who had stepped aside and who had allowed us to enter the world of the adult, now stepped back into place and gently resumed her role that required us to resume ours. We still had a month of school and state-given final exams to prepare for. We were all physically exhausted, and emotionally too. The adults couldn't have been more understanding or helpful in allowing us to go back to being kids for the time that remained. We finished the year, we took our exams, we graduated, went to college, got married, and suddenly found ourselves the adults we couldn't wait to become. It all happened fast enough--how lucky for us that we had people delaying that permanent and irreversible change for as long as they did.
I am sad whenever I think about how kids grow up too fast today. They have to know and think about all kinds of things that didn't even exist in our world. They have responsibilities and worries our imaginations couldn't have invented. That wonderful youth that Shaw said is wasted on the young isn't even offered to them any more. And they are so eager to grow up so fast that they deny themselves what little innocence and wonder are left for them. What a shame. I am glad I had the kind of youth I had, and I wouldn't trade any of it for the sophistication and freedom, the limousines and hotel rooms the kids have now. I was far luckier than they. I had the best prom ever.
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MENDELSSOHN, BAKLAVA, AND SPECIAL FRIENDS
Sweetness and Delight
Absence certainly does make the heart grow fonder. Though a more interesting essay might result from a thesis less widely accepted, I find myself thinking about a trio who have been absent from my life lately, and reflecting with pleasure on the sweet delight each has brought to me. I have learned that our favorite companions do not have to be our most constant; my very oldest and sturdiest friendship, one that began when we were eight-year-olds, I share with a friend I see now only every two or three years. My teaching schedule prevents me from seeing my best friends at school sometimes for weeks at a stretch, but I treasure their friendships no less for that. And so it is with these three whose anniversary I observed, privately, on January 12. Twenty-one years ago on that date I was introduced to three of the sweetest acquaintances of my life: the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, baklava, and special friends named Tony and Nancy Saada. I would have counted myself lucky to have met any one of these at any time. To have met all three on the same night must rival drawing an inside card to a straight flush.
For those who have never heard the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, I must agree with Klaus George Roy, the former program annotator for the Cleveland Orchestra, that they are to be envied the great pleasure that awaits them. Those who have never tasted baklava likewise don't know what they are missing. And those who do not know the Saadas have somehow gotten along without the friendship of two of the most pleasant people it has been my good fortune to know.
On the evening of January 12, 1973, my wife and I attended a concert of the Cleveland Orchestra which featured Pinchas Zuckerman (how ironic that his name means "sugar man") playing the Mendelssohn Concerto. I was especially eager to attend that concert because the preconcert talk in the chamber hall below the main auditorium was to showcase one of my students, Laurie Smuckler, at the time a high school junior but already a prodigious talent on the violin. While the speaker, probably Mr. Roy, spoke about the structure and meaning of the concerto, Laurie, then only seventeen or so, played the passages to illustrate. We attended that concert with two good friends, Lee and Heidi Makela, who for years afterward would comment on Laurie's performance. Laurie went on to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music and then at the Juilliard Conservatory; she now plays in a string quartet that performs all over the country. Several days before the event Laurie had asked me if I was going to attend the preconcert talk and hear her play. She was learning the concerto for a performance she'd be giving later, and this exposure would be good for her. I went to Severance Hall that night more excited about hearing Laurie than about hearing Zuckerman.
The demonstration was impressive and the concert performance was brilliant. The Mendelssohn Concerto, in E minor, a key often employed to suggest grief, is in fact a light and airy piece. If you know Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," and can recall the fairy music, you have an idea of the atmosphere created by the opening theme. The solo melody, accompanied by the orchestra playing arpeggios, is high in the register and characteristic of the composer's optimism. Mendelssohn has in fact been criticized for his silver-spoon existence; some have said that he'd have been a more profound composer if in his life he had encountered a few more hardships. Even if he was not Mozart or Beethoven, and unable to conceive of the tensions that characterized their lives and music, Mendelssohn could nonetheless create the atmosphere of the world he knew, and invite the listener to escape through the delicacy and lightness of his midsummer night sounds. The most enjoyable part of the concerto for me is the moment near the end of the first movement, when the cadenza is ending and the soloist is playing arpeggios over several octaves. The orchestra returns with the original theme that the solo violin had played at the beginning, and the movement continues as a reverse of the opening orchestration, the orchestra playing the theme and the soloist accompanying. It's very wonderful. Hearing the piece for the first time as played by the great Zuckerman and the even greater Cleveland Orchestra was an experience one does not easily forget.
Our custom in those pre-children days was to go to the concerts with the Makelas and follow up at either their house or ours for dessert. That night they hosted, and Heidi told us with some excitement that that day she had made baklava. I pretended to be pleased, but I in fact had no idea what baklava was. When she served it, I was surprised: a small lozenge of pastry on a dessert plate. It looked lonesome, and certainly the portion seemed to me skimpy. But one bite told me why. Who could eat more of that incredibly sweet pastry? It was layer upon layer of filo dough alternating with chopped nuts and butter, the whole thing bathed in a layer of honey and registering high on the richness scale. I realized immediately that a larger piece, such as what one has when eating pound cake, would be impossible. This delicious mouthful was just the right amount. We would all enjoy it without being sick.
During the conversation the doorbell rang, an odd occurrence for such a late hour. It turned out to be Tony and Nancy Saada, two friends of the Makelas who lived only a few houses away. They had also been at the concert and had been asked to join us. They had gone home first to see that their children were settled Heidi served them coffee and baklava (which they seemed to be familiar with) and the six of us talked into the night. The whole evening had been delightful, and if it had ended there, it would have been enough.
But it didn't end there. In those days before our children were born we had tickets to all kinds of pleasant events—concerts at Severance, the ballet, the Playhouse, Musicarnival (remember that?), and whatever else came along that we wanted to do. It seemed that we would run into the Saadas wherever we went. Not long after the Mendelssohn concert we were at the Playhouse, and so were they. We would see them at the art museum, and eventually came to find out that we even attended, irregularly, the same church. We saw the Saadas frequently, and came to value their friendship.
Tony teaches in the engineering department at Case Western Reserve University. I always enjoy hearing him speak on what it is like to teach at the university level. He has to attract research grants, and at times that becomes the overriding concern of his work. More than once he has expressed impatience and irritation at being prevented from doing what he wants to do—teach—because of pressure to write a grant proposal or design a research project that would attract money to the university. I recall a time Nancy organized a dinner party, and prepared a menu that duplicated a meal described in Gourmet magazine. She set her table to look just like the illustration in the magazine. But another time, when we happened by because "we were in the neighborhood," we were invited to stay for a Sunday dinner that was, even though impromptu, every bit as elegant and delightful. Nancy is a gracious hostess in any situation.
It's true that the more often we saw the Saadas the less often we seemed to see the Makelas, and that change disappointed us. It had nothing to do with preferring our new friends, only finding ourselves in the same places so often. As years went on, we came to think of the Saadas as very special people though we did not see them daily or even very often. Once our children were born we stopped going anywhere, especially to the concerts and plays where we had seen our friends so frequently. The Saada children grew up and came through the high school. I missed Christiane, but it was my pleasure to teach Richard when he was a senior. Both are married now with households of their own.
We don't see the Makelas very much either now, though we also enjoyed their children as students, and I haven't heard the Mendelssohn Concerto in a long time. I guess I'll have to make a point of getting a new recording of it. Baklava and I have parted company years ago; I just can't and shouldn't deal with food that rich any more. I remember with great pleasure the night my life was made sweeter because I was introduced to all three. My enjoyment is not diminished by the fact that they are not my constant companions.
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ABOUT CALVIN: AN EDITORIAL
On an otherwise lovely day, the day we returned from spring break, I finished my teaching and left school to drive the two and a half hours to my college town in Western New York to attend the memorial service for Calvin Smith, my friend and professor. His wife, Jean, had called the week before to tell us, my wife and me, the sad news and to ask if she or I would write some remembrance that could be read at the service.
The service was attended by many of Calvin's friends and former students. We were not the ones who came the greatest distance, and others, even further away, sent messages to share with the congregation. It was more than gratifying to see the esteem in which he had been held by his colleagues and his pupils. We heard speaker after speaker expressing some admiration for the kind of person and professor our Calvin Smith had been.
It had not taken me long to decide, after Jean asked me, what I wanted to say in my tribute to my teacher. Calvin was the one who taught me to write. It was in his honor that I had designed and named the course that I teach after the course he taught me: Advanced Composition. Much of what I try to pass along to my students is what Calvin tried to pass along to me.
I do not think I was a remarkable student in Calvin's class. I did my assignments, most of the time, and I thought I had done the reasonably well, until Calvin returned them with his comments, written in very small letters in the margins. He was uncompromising in his standards, and no small error in logic or language escaped him. He expected us to strive always for the highest achievement, and directed our journey toward that goal. One of my classmates who also spoke at the service told of being a truly mediocre student, more interested in basketball and baseball than in his major field, English, and of hoping to do well enough only to pass the course and to get his teaching certificated so that he could coach. Calvin would have none of it. He infused in Greg an appreciation of excellence that Greg claims made him not only a more successful writer than he had ever imagined possible, but also a better teacher and coach.
I said that Calvin so thoroughly illustrated the maxim, spoken often in teaching circles, that as educators we never know which of our students we will influence, in what ways we will do so, or when, if ever, that influence will show. As a thirty-year teacher of writing myself, I would be remiss if I did not aknowledge him as the single most influential instructor I ever had. Anyone who had ever taken a course from him would recall that he held us to very high standards, standards that seemed unattainable at the time. While it was not impossible to earn his approval, it was difficult. But it was true, as Thomas Paine wrote in that eighteenth-century style that Calvin admired so, that "what we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly." We worked hard because we knew that Calvin would not let us get away with sloppy writing or thinking; and when Calvin's praise finally came, it was deserved and it was sincere.
I was fortunate to have had the chance to study under such a professor, and he touched my life in ways, professional and personal, that no one could have anticipated or measured.
After composing my tribute to this very special teacher, I reflected again on a distressing application of these thoughts. Had we in Calvin's classes been tested by some external agency, some of us would have done quite well and some would have squeaked by. I don't know what my test results would have been, but I do know that no test could be devised to measure the effect Calvin Smith had on me and my career. My personal affection for him aside, I acknowledge him now as the single most influential teacher in my college experience, but I doubt I knew that thirty-one years ago when I struggled over essays that seemed never to be good enough to please him. I shudder to think that someone removed from the educational process might evaluate a teacher like Calvin on the basis of performance standards that cannot take into account the future that lay ahead of us but which no one—not Calvin, not we, certainly not the testmakers—could see. I would regret that positive evaluations, course assignments, and promotions might be withheld from a teacher whose immediate influence is invisible, and given instead to the ones whose pupils know the trendy answers or can perform like trained seals to satisfy the demands of the moment.
The telephone call from Jean Smith did not come out of the blue. In the three decades since graduating, Carol and I maintained a friendship with the Smiths that meant a lot to us. We visited them and they visited us, and we moved from our original relationship of teacher-and-students to another of colleagues. Calvin took interest in our careers and our family, and in several ways, many of them personal, continued to influence us long after he was our professor and on into his retirement. The opportunity to speak at his memorial service was an honor.
Somewhere there are teachers and principals whose careers hang in the balance, tilted one way or the other by test results that supposedly indicate their effectiveness. Calvin's memorial reminded me again, though I have never really forgotten, how troubled I am by the easy misinterpretation of test result data. Who can write the exam questions that reveal what effect a teacher has on his or her pupils, especially while they are still that teacher's students? Teachers are not like plumbers, who either fix the leaky pipes or don't. They are not like airline pilots, who either get you to your destination or not; nor like ballplayers who might hit the ball far enough or run fast enough, but who are nonetheless satisfied with a success rate of 25 or 30 percent. Perhaps teachers are more like investment counselors, who first require you to decide what your investment objectives are, and then suggest long-term actions that they believe will lead you to those investment goals. No one serious about investing evaluates an advisor on Tuesday for what Monday's stock recommendation did. And our greatest investments, those we make in our children's futures, need the same kind of long-term vision, something our system of external evaluation does not consider.
I am not prepared to say that the proficiency tests we administer to our students are entirely without value, nor that the district report cards issued by the state department of education are totally worthless. They are not. But they are so small a part of what matters in education, and those people who think they can judge a teacher or a school by such easy-to-measure criteria are so thoroughly mistaken! They need to be reminded of the Calvin Smiths in their own lives, so that they can acknowledge that successful teaching includes some unobservable, unexpected, and indefinable qualities no test can ever measure.
