“An Evening In Disguise”

This is my fourth col­umn of the week.

The first three shipped into Waitsburg as big boxes of perfectly flat Prom decorating supplies. They were made of white corrugated paper which my classmates and I cut into rectangles and taped togeth­er into the proper lengths.

Then three of us would kneel in front of one of these lengths, holding big card­board circles. We passed a hot glue gun on an exten­sion cord from person to person. Each person would squirt a two-inch line of glue, roll their cardboard onto it, and pass the gun to the next person as they waited for their glue to dry. When the gun came back to them, they would repeat the process. In this manner, it took about fifteen minutes to create a rather lumpy pil­lar by wrapping the paper around the circles.

From there, the column would be covered loosely in patterned paper, fitted with square endcaps (after said endcaps were glued togeth­er out of flat cutouts pieces), and trimmed above the caps with glued-on strips of black foam. Gold paper was glued to the sides of black curlicues, and another curli­cue would be glued on top of that, creating what looked like a three-dimensional half-mustache. These were stuck into slits in the side of giant black teacup-like structures (after the people in charge of gluing on foam agreed to lend their glue gun to the people in charge of gluing together the black teacup-like structures), and smaller swirls were glued to their undersides, making them look more like butter­flies than mustaches.

Giant gold balloons were inserted in the cardboard 'teacups', the balloon-tea­cup butterfly things were at­tached to the tops of the col­umns, glittering cardboard masks two feet wide were glued to the middle of the columns, and feather boas and gold festooning were draped over everything.

See? So simple, even eleventh-graders could do it.

Preparing for prom, as this example illustrates, is nowhere close to as simple as the gorgeous pictures in prom-supply catalogues would lead you to believe. These columns were only a trifling component of the huge kit we ordered.

Given all this, I'm still shocked we achieved such gorgeous results.

Junior Prom 2014 (pre­sented by the Class of 2015) had a masquerade theme. We called our event "An Evening In Disguise" and offered a prize (in the form of a $25 American Eagle gift certificate) for the nic­est mask. We took special pains to ensure that the court's tiaras coordinated, and splurged on a tiara for the queen that measured four inches high.

The venue itself (the Preston Hall gym) was gorgeous. Swags of red and black gossamer were draped from the ceiling to the second-story balcony, and a gold tinsel chandelier hung from each corner of the room. A metallic path­way lined with twinkling lights and ripples of gauze led from the entry to the dance floor. A huge, glitter­ing arch topped with glitter- covered mask cutouts filled one corner; two of the ardu­ously constructed columns framed another. The deejay sat behind two black-and- gold spirals between which yet another mask facsimile was propped.

Call me biased, but I think "An Evening in Dis­guise" was, in every respect, an evening for the ages.