Prom Night

Bethel’s high school prom is an event unlike any prom anywhere else. To understand why that is, you must understand Bethel.

This is a dusty, grimy little river town with mostly dirt roads and wooden boardwalks. To say that the dress code here is “relaxed” is an understatement. I would wager that well over half the adult men in Bethel do not own a suit. Women rarely wear high heels and most don’t wear makeup. Getting “dressed up”—for Sunday church, for a wedding or a funeral—generally means that your jeans are clean and have no unintended holes in them, and that you scraped the mud off your boots.

A formal event is a rare occurrence here, and requires extensive planning. Bethel has no dress shops, tux rental shops, shoe stores, florists or limo-rental services. We have no department stores, and no mall. Shopping for clothes in Bethel is pretty much limited to browsing the jeans and t-shirts in the clothing sections of the two grocery stores. Not exactly prom appropriate.

Bethel Regional High School is a small school with a total student body of about 225. This year, 35 seniors will graduate. In my high school of 800 students (250 in my graduating class), the juniors and the seniors each had a separate prom; here there is a single prom for both juniors and seniors and whomever they choose to invite.

Preparations begin months in advance. Rented tuxes are ordered online and mailed out from Anchorage. For the girls, a shopping trip to Anchorage is generally required. The state wrestling and basketball championships earlier in the spring (with travel paid by the school) offered excellent opportunities for shopping. The girl’s basketball team was eliminated early, and the girls dedicated the rest of their time to the pursuit of the perfect prom dress. Corsages and boutonnieres must also be ordered early, and they cannot be bought in Bethel.

In my day (granted, a few years ago), not to have a date for the prom was a social black mark of the highest order. If you didn’t have a date, you spent the last school day before the event talking widely about how prom is nothing but a stupid and juvenile social ritual and a huge waste of money and you wouldn’t go even if someone had invited you. What you did NOT do, under any circumstance, was show up without a date, either alone or in a party of your same-gender friends. It just did not happen.

What also did not happen at prom in my day was the appearance of parents. There were a handful of chaperones—favorite teachers, invited by the Prom Planning Committee to serve that function—but no other adults.

This is where Bethel’s prom is different than any other I ever heard of. It is a community event, and one that inspires quite a stir around town. It is the one opportunity to see our young people really dressed up.

The prom starts at 8:00 pm, and only the attendees are allowed in the door. By 8:30 the community starts lining up at the door—families, little kids, neighbors, anyone who wants to come. At 9:00 the doors are opened and the crowd surges in. The focus of the prom decorating committee has been the creation of a stage-type backdrop and runway. Once the crowd has gathered around the runway—cameras ready—the Grand Promenade begins. An announcer introduces each couple individually and they walk “onstage”, pause for photos, and then proceed down the runway with several more pauses for photos. Dozens of flashes going off at once, it resembles a Hollywood Grand Opening. And this year’s prom theme is “Hollywood.”

Those attending without a date are introduced alone. Several girls were introduced as pairs; not that they are lesbian (though they could be, and that would be fine), they just decided to come together since they didn’t have dates. Plenty of girls were dancing together, too. The mores of the 70’s (at least in the Deep South) did not allow such flexibility; sometimes change is a very good thing.

The Promenade lasted about an hour. Afterwards there was much milling about and more photo-taking. Then the non-promers were invited to leave so the kids could get on with their Big Event. Dutch and I were quick to skedaddle, and left hoping the rest of the adults would do the same.

Not having kids in the school system here, I have not previously attended the Grand Promenade. This year our young friend Michael, son of Joan, was attending for the first time (he’s a junior), so of course we had to go. Now we will probably show up every year, just to see the kids dressed up. In Bethel, there is nothing like it.

All photos by The Tundra PA. Michael is that handsome dude in the next to last photo.