By Linda Song
Gargoyle staff reporter
Posted Thursday, May 18, 2006, The OG, features

Colorful lights, swishing gowns, impeccable tuxedoes, and the sound of music in the air. Prom has long been one of the most awaited events for high school students. The magic of prom is said to never fade from our memories. Thirty years from now, what will you remember about the big event?

“I don't have many memories about prom,” says chemistry teacher David Bergandine. “It was so many years ago.”

Bergandine attended his first and only prom in 1977 when he was a student at Dundee High School, in Dundee, Ill. His failure to recall much about his prom, other than that he wore peach and had a date, might seem unusual. After all, he had been elected prom king, which is why he went in the first place.

But the rest of the evening may have been too ordinary. It's those certain incidents that “didn't go quite right” that people are bound to be remember for years to come.

Physical education department head Sally Walker, who went to high school in Pennsylvania, recalls her far-from-perfect prom night. It was 1977, her junior year, and she didn't go very willingly.

“I went because my mom made me,” Walker remembers. “Someone asked me to go, and she told me that I needed to do it. I just didn't want to go to prom.”

But she relented, and from there unfolded a story that some upperclassmen have heard during their classes with Walker. It involves prom in a town an hour away from where she lived, dinner reservations, getting lost, and making a wrong turn down a one-way street in the “bad part of town.”

All of this culminated in a tiny collision with a parked car that ended up costing her escort all of the money in his pocket. Walker returned to the dance a little peeved.

“I sat there for most of the night just talking,” she says. “I think I was home by 11 o'clock.”

Secretary Barb Aschenbrenner, who was a student at Unity High School in Tolono, attended her first and only prom in 1972, her junior year. Instead of going to Unity's, she went with her boyfriend (and future husband) to his prom. He was a student at Allerton-Broadlands-Longview High School (“Abl” for short, now Heritage High School). The location of Abl's prom — Huntington Towers in Champaign — was less than desirable in her eyes.

“It was on the 21st floor, and I'm deathly afraid of heights,” Aschenbrenner recalls with a laugh. “We stayed far away from the windows.”

Of the Uni faculty members interviewed for this article, few actually attended prom. For example, English teacher Matt Mitchell, history teacher Chris Butler, and librarian Frances Harris stayed clear of theirs.

“I have no idea about my senior prom night — I'm not even sure I knew when it happened, I was so thoroughly detached from the mainstream social scene at my school,” comments Mitchell, who went to high school in Manasquan, N.J., and graduated in 1990. “My sense is that proms have really blown up since then, as a major and even compulsory event that requires lots of time and money and rentals of one kind or another and that you'll regret for the rest of your life if everything isn't just ‘perfect.'”

Like Mitchell in New Jersey, Harris kept her distance from the conventional social scene at George Washington High School in Denver, Colo.

“Prom was seen as part of ‘the system.' It was the '60s, and [my friends and I] were rebels,” laughs Harris.

She comes closer before adding with a smile, “Though, secretly, I would have gone if someone had asked me.”

So what's the moral of the story? Whether or not people attend their high school proms doesn't seem to affect their lives very profoundly. In the grand scope of things, prom is just another school dance that will be an exciting moment in your life. Chances are, even that memory will fade away.