PROM 2: Twice the Prom, Twice the Promiscuity

Remember that scene in Animaniacs where the Warner Brothers are annoying the professor so he just starts pulling his hair out, chunk by chunk?

No?  Well you should spend more time watching 90s cartoons on YouTube like me and stop wasting your time with pointless things like work, or a life.

Come on, it’s the Animaniacs.  It’s worth it.

But as I was saying, there’s this scene in one of the first episodes where the Animaniacs are trying to be controlled to the point where they aren’t, you know, completely insane.  This therapist that tries to help them gets so stressed that he pulls out all of his hair.

I don’t know what it’s like to go through such a hair-raising ordeal (Eh? Eh???  No?  Shut up.), but after these past three weeks or so, I’m pretty sure my mom does.

Now before you get all comfy and cozy reading this post, I would like to inform you that this is what you’d call a “sequel.”  That’s right.  It promises to have cheap laughs from the original, a washed up storyline, and you’re almost guaranteed to leave on a rather disappointed note. 

Hopefully, because I make no money from this blog, I can focus on the content and not half-ass this like SOME bloggers I know.

I don’t know any bloggers that make money from blogging on a personal note, so that point has no credibility whatsoever.

ANYWAY, as I said before my typical departure from the subject, this is, in fact, a sequel to what is (as of May 21) my most popular post, simply titled, “Puttin’ the Prom in Promiscuous.” 

That original post is HERE.

And now that I’ve gotten that off of my chest, here we are at PROM 2012.

Now it seems that Prom hadn’t completely scared me away.   I mean, I did end up having fun, and I certainly did eat some pretty good food and had a couple decent free drinks.

Also, I had a score to settle with the Chocolate Fountain.

Back in February, when every girl was dreaming of having boys make completely unrealistic prom askings, which was partially feuled by boys who were more whipped than Reddi-Whip bending over backwards to ask their girlfriends to Prom.

Of course, there was the big snow ball dance, but getting a date for that isn’t NEARLY as important or relavant.  The only thing that matters to high school is Prom.

Personally, I think it’s kind of ridiculous, but I always considered that it was because I was a guy and would not abide to such ladylike standards.

Also because I couldn’t find a date for that either.

Actually, now that I recall, I had a girlfriend at the time.

Oops.

But anyway, I was getting sick of prom a few months before it even started coming up in everyday conversation.  And when said girlfriend and I broke up about the first or second week of March, I made what I considered to be a great decision:

I was gonna go stag.

That’s right.  I was gonna go all out on it, too.  All white tux, hair slicked back, a regular

Douchebag Darrel.

But then, I got a lead role in a musical.

See, one of the greatest theatre perks is that when you get a really significant role in a musical, suddenly your sexiness level skyrockets no matter who you are.  And why shouldn’t they have liked me?  I had solos, so I could sing, I had a big role, so I was talented, and I was basically the only guy in theatre who would talk to people that was single, so basically they had to like me out of default.

I am such a stud.

Unfortunately, this sudden new appearance to girls wasn’t going to help the idea of going to prom stag.

This girl even gave herself the apparently grueling task to personally find a date for me.

She had it narrowed down to two girls, including herself.

Subtle.  Very subtle.

But I managed to shake her off finally.  Granted, it was me telling her that I had an idea and that I was gonna ask a girl soon enough.

But I didn’t.  


BEST.  LIE.  EVER.

So, I got into a group with my friends, still totally dateless, and the prom plans began to formulate.  We were going to go to a fancy steakhouse in St. Paul.  We were gonna take a party bus.  We were gonna PARTY IT UP afterwards for the twenty minutes or so that everyone needed to get home because most of us were juniors and had to be home at a respectable hour.  There were gonna be minimal pictures, and it would just be a good time for everyone.

Then I got a date.

That’s right.  I found out that the two groups were splitting up.  One went to the party bus, the others were just carpooling.  I chose to carpool because I didn’t want to pay for a bus or a steak.  So I was in another group and, apart from one girl, I was the only one without a date.  That girl said she wanted a date and I was all:

Well, it is me.  I always find something to complain about.

But no, really.  It was a great time.

Now, because our group split into two and I was a cheapskate and didn’t want to pay, we decided to just not go to the steak house anyway.  There’s twenty more dollars I can spend on pointless things, right?

Right!

However, I’m going to sound a little contradicting to the original prom post on a few statements, particularly the one about classy dining.

We went to Chuck E. Cheese.

There’s nothing like going up to Prom with your super-classy white tux and a pair of glow in the dark fangs you won for getting 200 tickets.

After I got to meet what I consider to be the ugliest mascot of all time, (seriously, I’m pretty sure that Chuck E is like Mickey Mouse’s mentally-challenged little brother or something), we drove to prom in my dad’s car.  This was a pretty big deal for me, because that car is like my dad’s second son, and I’m a teenager, therefore making me, by default, a horrible driver.

I love society’s strange opinions about me.

Then again, when you go to places like Chuck E. Cheese’s as the precursor to a formal event, I suppose that you’d be getting judged pretty harshly.

However, upon arriving at the prom center (I kid you not, that’s what the place is called.  They seriously have a building dedicated to this event that’s within 30 miles of my house), the judging began to stop and we all focused on having a great time at the dance.

There were, however, a few annoying instances.

This happened at least six times, all in pretty much the exact same way, by about six different people.  And while I found it incredibly annoying, I realized that this meant that people read my blog, and…

See what I mean about repeating inside jokes from other posts?  Boo Yah.

Apart from it all, the music sucked, the food was tasty, and I actually didn’t spill any chocolate from the chocolate fountain on me, which was definitely an improvement from last year.

All in all, prom this year was pretty fantastic.

Then there was the after party.

And this is where things get interesting.

So prior to prom, my group had decided that we would all go to one of the guy’s in our group’s grandma’s house because there was a hot tub there.  The place, overall, was about 40 minutes from my home, and I had a full tank of gas, so it seemed that everything would be grand.

At about 11:30, near the end of the dance, that guy came up to me and told me that he left his swim trunks at his house and that a couple other people decided to go last minute to get their stuff.  They said that they would leave at about that time, so that when they came back, it would be about midnight, when the chaperones kicked us out of the building, so we could all drive there in a straight line.

While this was a great plan in theory, pulling it off in actuality proved to be a wee bit difficult.

Anyway, we finally all met up in the parking lot, gathered the eight of us in three cars, and were on our merry way.  And as we pulled out of the parking lot, everything seemed like it would work out.

And as we were almost back to our high school, we discovered that we might be a bit lost.

So, we quickly pulled into an abandoned parking lot and tried to figure out just what exactly it was we were doing wrong.  Ten minutes or so of arguing ensued, and each of us, all weary from dancing to poorly remixed One Direction and Taylor Swift songs, could not understand, for the life of us, how to comprehend the directions that Google Maps had provided us.

Google.  We trusted you.  HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO US?!

Then, a sudden realization was made.

So we piled the eight of us back into the three cars and slowly but surely, we made it to the house and the hot tub.

At 1:30.

An hour late.

But the important thing was that we made it. 

Sort of.

See, the two people in the third car of the post-prom train, for whatever reasons, had decided that they did not actually want to be there, so as soon as they arrived, they drove away into the early morning.

After they left, we swapped pants for trunks and dresses for bikinis and we chilled in the hot tub for a while, talking the night away, relaxing, and having more than a healthy dose of Sun Chips and Cherry Coke.

Before we knew it, it was 3:45 AM and we suddenly realized that we were not granted the right to stay the whole night.

Oops.

We quickly (and believe me when I say this is an incredibly relative term) changed again, this time into pajamas and sweat pants and we headed back to the highway.  Back to the cities.  Back home.


Orrrrrrr so we thought.

Fun Fact:  It is surprisingly difficult to find a highway at 4:15 in the morning.

But we did it, due to my incredible driving skills, and by only 4:50, we were back home.  I woke everyone up as we were about to take our exit.

As I said, long night.

But don’t worry, the night ended on a high note.

Oh, prom.  What a romantic night indeed.

As I slowly walked to my bedroom, anticipating glorious, beautiful sleep, I was suddenly hit with a sudden, horrible realization.

Never had I been so against going to church in my entire life.  Now I know how atheists feel. 

But I still had a commitment to teach Sunday School at my church’s 11:00 service, so I looked at the clock next to my ever-so inviting bed.  It was 5:30.

I reasoned with myself.  Should I fall asleep?  I’ll probably just be out for fifteen minutes, wake up, and proceed to be a zombie for the rest of the day.  Not my cup of tea.

Staying awake it was.

One shower later, I pulled on the clothes I would be wearing that day.  I sat on my bed to put my socks on.

I am amazingly dedicated to myself.

I woke up five hours later, with about fifteen minutes to spare before my class started.  I rushed out the door, sped to the local gas station, and managed to walk into the church with a hot coffee and a donut in hand only to find the woman in charge of our Sunday School saying:

If it weren’t for the fact that I was surrounded by children in a church, I would have been yelling expletives that definitely would have lost me that teaching job.  But  I managed to stifle my anger, which is really easy to do when you don’t have the energy for any of the yelling you were planning on doing in the first place, and live through an hour of fifth graders and Jesus talk.  I packed up afterwards and drove home to an empty house.

My dad had taken his car to the Twins game with my mom for mother’s day (she’s a huge baseball fan), which meant I had the whole house to myself.  It was optimal napping atmosphere, and right when I lay my head on the pillow, I suddenly remembered that I had to return my tuxedo by five.

May as well get over it now, I thought.  And as I grabbed my keys to get my tux out of the car, I suddenly realized.

My dad had the car.

The car with my tux in the trunk.

In a parking lot somewhere near Target Field.

For a baseball game that would most likely not get over by five.

Let’s just say my dad was less than thrilled that I left my tux there.

Fortunately, the fine was only twenty dollars, so I decided that a nap was totally worth it.

Pssh, who needs sleep?

I rushed to the tux store, parked, and waited.

Finally, over the concrete rolled the wheels of salvation.  Or my dad’s Mazda3.  Whatever.  I grabbed my tux bag and shoes, dashed out, ripped the tux (very gently, of course) out of my mother’s hands, put them all in the tux bag, and stepped into the door at 4:58.

Oh, Prom.  I will never forget the magic you bestow upon me.