Bracelet
Tue., January 18, 08:08 AM
Sometimes I think I’m living in an attic; I never know what’s buried in the clutter. Among the strange things I’ve found recently is a bracelet. I don’t wear bracelets very much, mostly because they bother me when I type. My friend Gloria sent me a couple of hers, which I wear occasionally because they have sentimental value, but otherwise…no. I even forget to wear the pink bracelets I’ve acquired as a cancer patient.
What we have here is some light-weight silver-toned metal. It’s not stainless steel, but it doesn’t corrode, not even after forty-plus years. A solid but flexible bracelet with a single pendant. The pendant is an open circle with two hearts inside (so romantic) and the inscription “SHS 1958.” Ah, the favor from my senior prom.
Proms were very conventional and fixed back in the day. They were held in the high school gym – hotel sites were in the future – and the decoration committee worked within limited parameters. A translucent fabric, same cloth every year, was draped over the rafters, and cutout stars were scattered on top. They used a window pole to poke the stars into place. (Do schools still have windows that you have to open and close with a pole?) They festooned the bleachers with ribbons in the class colors. Refreshments were punch and cookies; you didn’t spend much on that. The biggest expense was the band.
Most classes bought some kind of memento – usually paper favors – for the girls. Of course, all couples were boy-girl. No one went stag; the girls wouldn’t have considered it, and single boys (i.e., potential trouble-makers) simply were not allowed. The boys wore black tuxedos and the girls wore fluffy, bouffant, bare-shouldered evening gowns. (One girl wore a softly draped – actually very sophisticated – silk dress, and the rest of us wondered what was the matter with her.)
As it happened, ours was a very rich class. One of the ways that classes earned money was to produce plays. Our junior year play was such a success that we easily sold out the senior class play; I think we even put it on for two nights. (Interestingly, no one in those terrific casts became professional actors.) In any case, we had plenty of money, and the prom committee wanted to use it to hire Ray McKinley and the Dorsey Band, a famous, really good, band. However, the teacher advisors for our class wouldn’t allow it. I don’t know why; they didn’t have to offer a reason, because they were adults.
Well, what are you going to do with the extra money? It had to be spent. (I wonder what would have happened to it if they hadn’t been able to spend it.) The committee decided that they would buy permanent favors for the girls. I have no idea whether the guys had any souvenir to remember the evening, but I still have the bracelet.
My date, incidentally, was not a “steady,” just a good friend who escorted me that night. He died in a traffic accident a couple of years later, a sad loss to everyone who knew him.
