The Mysteries of Prom Night

By Garrison Keillor

Spring in Minnesota and the first lawn mowing and first outdoor supper, and then it's spring prom. White limos the size of trawlers float up to a hotel marquee and disgorge boys in black tuxes and girls in black or turquoise or tangerine or emerald, and they troop in through the revolving doors, prepared to execute a waltz and make small talk if necessary.

This morning the boys were traipsing around in droopy pants with the crotch below the knees and unlaced basketball shoes and baseball caps turned backward, a costume that gives me the creeps, especially the backward cap. It's painful to see young men grasping at boyishness, knowing that most young women prefer men to boys, but maybe a night in waltz land will help.

Parents used to worry about children staying out late for spring prom, worry they would start breeding, but I'll bet the kids in the limos are too smart to make babies. Much better to remain nubile for another 20 years, have romances with various inappropriate people, earn a bucket of money by hosting their own TV show or modeling underwear or e-trading, and live in a cool house and give awesome parties, and get a real life somewhere around the age of 35. They know the grief that children cause, having so recently caused it--the noise, the mess, the stink, the sports programs. Millions of intelligent, literate parents condemned to long afternoons watching children scuffle around on soccer fields, a deadly punishment that should be reserved for convicted felons. And as a parent, you are forced to come in contact with educators.

My wife and I found a wonderful nursery school in St. Paul for our two-year-old, and then the educator in charge informed us that the children are required to ask permission of one another before hugging or touching. "We feel that the privacy of a child's body should be respected by other children," she said. She meant it. This is classic educator thinking: rigidity and humorlessness put forward as policy. But this is Minnesota, where Appropriate Behavior rides high in the saddle and where you hear yourself, a pink person, referred to as "a person of noncolor," and you open the morning paper and find 10,000 words about why we should all appreciate racial and ethnic diversity. It's called civic journalism, and the tone is so gummy and patronizing, you can easily see why Minnesota elected a Governor who once earned his living screeching and frothing and exchanging perspiration with other giant goombahs. He is Mr. None-of-the-Above, a guy who doesn't talk about appreciating diversity or appropriate behavior. He is a guy who may show up at the prom half-naked with his face painted blue. This is a sort of liberation.

I wish our kids were as free and easy as the Governor. There he is swaggering on TV and enjoying a late adolescence, and the kids I meet seem cautious, fearful of making the wrong choice and of losing their place on the ladder and getting stuck among the slackers. Thanks to his loony attitude toward higher education ("If you're smart enough to go to college, you're smart enough to pay for it yourself"), tuition at our state colleges will stay sky-high, meaning kids who graduate leave with a debt load as big as a barn. This is the difference between my day and now. In my day, the G.I. Bill made it patriotic to support higher education, and those of us who went to college in the 1960s were the beneficiaries: tuition was cheap. Now we launch kids into the world with a devalued B.A. from a declining state college and $15,000 in debt and an additional $10,000 on four different credit cards.

It isn't fair. It isn't natural. Kids are not supposed to be indebted to us, they're supposed to get loose of us. That's why nature created those powerful hormones that make them glare at us and slam doors. Nature isn't interested in privacy or diversity, only survival, and it wants children to escape our clutches so that they can grow up and rear their own children and continue the species and come back in a few years and place us in assisted living.

I see these boys in tuxes and starched white shirts, and I want to take them aside for some fatherly advice. Boys, the first drink is a boon, the second is a gamble, the third is poor judgment, and then the rate of descent gets steep. And another thing: don't get all fluttery, high minded and patronizing just because people look different--that was your parents, that's not you. People are people. And still another thing: don't get yourself in hock to attend a college that isn't much good. It's an education just to leave home and go someplace where people don't understand you and don't even want to. And one more thing: advice is no substitute for personal experience, unfortunately.