Read Goober Diary Archives
Mar.
15, 2004: Prom Night
Man, if you weren't
at the big CD Release/Birthday show on Saturday night, I wish you coulda been there!
All I can say is: Best. Birthday. EVER! I really think that every musician should get
to have a show like that once in his or her life, with a packed house, a rockin' great band
backing you up, a giant cake, and all of your friends in the front row, dancing and cheering
you on. As soon as I get some photos back, I'll post them on the site.
It's not like I make
a habit of taking my friends for granted, but nights like that make me realize all the more
how lucky I really am. If I ever do make it big, my friends will be able to take all the credit.
They do so much for me. Not only do they support me by coming to my shows, but they play on
my records, they sing with me onstage, they bring me amazing birthday gifts (even when I've told
them not to), they send me silly e-mails, they call me for stress-relieving gossip sessions,
and (the importance of this last item cannot be overstated), they offer a sympathetic ear when I'm tired and feel like
quitting. It's almost magic, a kind of alchemy; when I run out of energy and motivation, their
talent and enthusiasm seeps into me and inspires me to keep going, to do more, to do better, to be
like them.
Memorable Release/Birthday Party Moments:
- Seeing people I hadn't seen in years, like Zach and Carter and Theresa.
- Talking to a very drunk boy about how white people are inherently susceptible to "the Go-Go's beat."
- Virginie handing me flowers onstage at exactly the right moment.
- Getting excited about the ending of one of the songs and then not being able to figure out how to end it
(knew I should have left that to Kenny).
- Having a rotating "guest" microphone and getting to play and sing with some of my favorite
musicians - and people - in Atlanta.
- Running out of extra large t-shirts two days after having gotten them in (don't worry; I'm getting more).
- Seeing people in the crowd with Lindsay Smith stickers pasted onto their clothes.
The only thing I didn't like about
fronting a band was that I didn't get to watch them play! Kenny Howes is
one of my favorite people to watch onstage, and I was too busy doing my own thing to check out his moves (though, luckily, I
got to see his opening set). And I know from watching Derik and Kenneth
play in their band how much they enjoy what they do and how much it shows. Especially Derik! He's one of
those drummers who flips his sticks around and throws them up in the air and generally just hams it up
as much as he possibly can, and I so missed getting to watch him do his thing! But the flip side is
that I got to experience something I don't get to do very often: just sing, safe in the knowledge
that the guys behind me have got my back. (I even handed Kenny my guitar and took a Whitney Houston
moment for "Love & Airplanes." In my sparkly dress and tiara, I felt like I was finally living out my childhood dream of
appearing on Solid Gold.)
My best friend Allison was at the
release party, and we had a nice moment after the show. She said, "When you played 'Head Over Heels' I got so nostalgic because the very first time I
ever heard you sing was at an Octave show when you sang that song. That seems like so long ago;
I hadn't even left the Opera yet! And now look how far we've both come!" It does indeed seem like eons
have passed since the days when we used to sit on her couch watching bad T.V. (Dawson's Creek, to be specific)
and talking about what our lives were versus what we wanted them to be and wondering how on earth one
went about making progress in the music and acting businesses, respectively. We have indeed come far, and it's
a good feeling. On the other hand, Allison also gave me a photocopy of a magazine article she read about
Sex and the City in which the writer opined that the thing about the women on that show that made
her the most jealous was not the wardrobes or the jobs or the plentiful sex but the simple fact that
these four friends had so much time to spend with each other. She pointed out that friendships are built
from the minutiae of everyday life and that, as we get older and busier, we make time to talk with our friends
about the important things in our lives, but we no longer have the time to sit on each other's couches
and chat for hours about nothing much in particular. Allison's right: I do miss those days.
Not that my life is not majorly better now than it was then, but I do miss having time for my friends.
I miss calling them up and saying, "Hey, what are you doing?" and having the answer be, "Nothing. Wanna come
over?" I love my friends just as much now as I did then, but it is true that it feels very different
and much less intimate than it did when we had all that free time to spend together.
Now I have to shift
gears a little - I've got the Storytelling Festival the last weekend in March, and then it's
time for the Renaissance Festival - so I
will be folksinger girl for a while until I can figure out how to put a band together that will
allow me to have shows that awesome all the time. (Ah, Kenny, how I wish you still lived in
Atlanta.) But of course, they can't be that awesome all the time. If they were all that
awesome, they would cease to be awesome at all, and rock star jading would set in. Or so I hear.
Me, I can't imagine ever getting sick of having gigs like the one on Saturday.
So, the big question
that everyone asks me now is, "So, were you Prom Queen?" Of course, the answer is no. But
every time someone asks me, I remember my Senior Prom, the only one I went to, and I smile.
So I decided that I would make this month's entry the one where I tell you guys the story of
my Senior Prom.
First, some background.
The Prom story makes the most sense when preceded by the Homecoming story. Because the best nights of
one's life are the ones that are even better in contrast to the worst nights of one's life.
I went to Homecoming my Junior
year with the boy who was my first real boyfriend, according to me at the time. From the
vantage point I have now, I prefer to block him out completely and consider the next boyfriend I had - ten years later - to
be my real first real boyfriend, but in order to tell the Homecoming story, I must
acknowledge the existence of the boy I dated my Junior year of high school.
We met at computer camp the summer
before Junior year and "went out" for about three months, the particulars of which
consisted of the occasional phone call and the occasional date, during which he would
tell me that I talked too much and that it was weird how I sang all the time and that I really should
wear make-up because I could probably overcome the problem of my looks if I just put in some effort, and then
we would make out.
Needless to say, this relationship did not last forever (and I so wish I could say that it was because I developed
a backbone and told him to get bent, but, sadly, that was not how it went down), and I found myself boyfriendless exactly a week before Homecoming, when I
found out (from the friend who had set us up in the first place because she'd decided she didn't
want him) that he had asked another girl to the Homecoming dance at his school. (The fact that we
went to different schools is no doubt what allowed the relationship to last for three whole months.)
Anyway, after a conversation that included such quoteworthy gems as "Well, I love you
when I'm with you, but when I'm not with you, I don't think about it" and "What you've got on the
inside is fine, it's great! But on the outside? I don't think so," he told me that we were
officially broken up but that he was still coming with me to Homecoming because, after all, I had
already bought the tickets, and we had gotten my friend Becky a date with his military school
buddy. In retrospect, of course, I see that there could have been no outcome to the evening but
misery, but at the time, I was naive. I had gone
to a big city department store with my mom and grandmother to buy a gorgeous green dress, and I
figured that my Cinderella night would happen after all, even if my date didn't technically love me.
Or, you know, respect me, like me as a person, or find me at all attractive.
So, Homecoming night arrives,
after a phone conversation that consists of me asking him questions such as "Where would you boys like
to eat beforehand?" and him answering "I don't care" and Becky and I are psyched and ready for the
dance. (It's so hard to try to go back to this and understand why I was so excited about going to
the stupid Homecoming dance. It so doesn't seem like a big deal now. But at the time, it felt like
the magic key that would open up the world of boys and dating and popularity and make everyone
like me.) My ex and his friend showed up at my house only a little bit late, and he posed
amiably enough for the obligatory photos taken by my mom. He did not compliment my dress or hair or make-up,
and, since I was partly trying to prove to him that I could be pretty, I was disappointed. (My sister had spent an hour crimping my hair - stop laughing, it
was the 80's - and I'd found a green velvet choker at a thrift shop to match my dress, of which
I was quite proud.) I had gotten a boutonniere for my date, understanding that this was procedure,
but he said he didn't want to put holes in his suit and refused it. Neither he nor his friend
had bought corsages.
After the photos came
the moment when I said, "OK, let's go get Becky and then go to the restaurant." My date
said, "Restaurant??? We're going to a restaurant?" I said, "Well, yeah. That's what people
do. I asked you where you wanted to eat, and you said you didn't care and that Becky and I
should decide." He said, "Well, I didn't know you wanted to go to a restaurant! I thought you
were asking me whether we should eat at your place or hers." Leaving aside the fact that he'd
expected the mother of the girl he'd unceremoniously dumped a week before to cook him dinner,
I said, "No, we made reservations at Chef Juliano's." Which led to the disclosure that the
boys had exactly three dollars between them. So, my mom gave me money for dinner, and we left
to get Becky.
The scene at Becky's house
was much the same (the boutonniere wasn't exactly regulation with the military school uniform,
dinner money was procured from Becky's mom) except that my date complimented her dress, quite
effusively.
Dinner was an endurance
test of awkwardness and shame as my date proceeded to order the most expensive dish on the menu
(the rest of us - conscious of our financial situation - ordered the least expensive dish) and flirt
madly with my friend all the way through dinner. His friend was quite taken with her as well, and
I sat like a lump, wishing I had brought a book. At one point, I even got pathetic enough to ask,
"So, what do you think of my dress?" to which my date replied, "Um... well, I like your neck thing."
Of course, the dance was dismal.
Of course, no one danced with me. My date ran into someone he'd gone to grade school with, and they
danced together for most of the night, while my date's friend kept Becky awkwardly pressed to him the
whole time, despite her increasing desire to escape. If it hadn't been for the blessing of running
into a couple of friends who'd come stag, I wouldn't have spoken to anyone at all. But compared to
dinner and what happened after the dance, the dance itself was rather uneventful. (And lame enough
to make me wonder what I'd been so excited about. The cafeteria still looked like the cafeteria,
the DJ played hip-hop all night, and if we hadn't been dressed up, it would have been a pep
rally, and I hated pep rallies.)
After the dance, we went back
to Becky's house and hung out in her living room while both our dates tickled her and teased
her about her sweaty palms. When my date finally drove me home, he got out of the car, walked me to
my front door, and said, "Hey, can I get back that video and that one book I loaned you?" I procured
said items for him, and he said, "See ya," and that was the end of it.
Well, almost. Becky is such
a good friend that she waited until a year later to tell me that my ex actually called her the next
day to ask her out. (She was more than happy to turn him down.) And his friend pursued her for months, often showing up at the mall when
she was working and following her around the store.
So, that was Homecoming,
and I only told you that whole long, depressing story so that I could tell you about Prom.
Not much changed between Junior and Senior
year, but at the same time, everything changed. I still didn't feel like I was popular or anything,
and I still didn't have boys chasing me, but I no longer felt that those things were grounds for
suicide. I had a group of friends to
hang out with on the weekends (mostly playing board games, but it was progress from spending my
weekends alone in my room, reading), I was involved in music and theatre, and I was starting
to grow into my personality and not feel terrified all the time. I still had the tendency to get
huge crushes on unattainable boys, though, and my boy of the moment (of the past year or so, actually) was
a cute boy from my community theatre group. He was Mormon, which meant our love was doomed, which
only made me like him more. He was so nice, so decent. I got my friend Laird to give me a Book of Mormon
so that I could study up, just in case he ever decided that I was The One and I had to convert.
My friend Moria had a boy she
was crushing on, too, and we both felt that we had detected perhaps mild interest from the boys in question,
but we were both unsure of how to develop that into something that might lead to actual dating. We dared each other to ask out our crushes and made a deal that if they both said yes, we
would double date.
Both of the boys (being nice
boys) said yes, so Moria and I went into a planning frenzy. Given my only other experience with
dances of this kind, I was reluctant to make reservations at a fancy restaurant, so Moria and I
came up with a scheme to have our Prom Night dinner at McDonald's. At first, it was a joke, but the more we
thought about it, the more we loved the idea of surprising the boys with a feast at McDonald's,
served on silver platters and fine china. So I arranged to borrow some of my stepmother's fine
dinnerware and agreed to get everything ready on the dinner front. Moria made plans to borrow her
stepfather's classic car, and we both started shopping for dresses. I think my favorite pre-Prom
memory is that of my date calling me and saying, "So listen, my mom says I'm supposed to ask
you what color your dress is" and knowing that, this time, I was getting a corsage!
Prom Night itself was... well,
remember when I said that my CD release party was the kind of show that every musician should get to
have once? Well, Prom was like that, too. It was exactly what Prom should be like; it was fun,
I looked pretty, and I was with my favorite guy. The staff of the McDonald's loved our little joke
and did everything they could to make it special for us; they set up the table ahead of time with the
china and crystal I'd given them, they dimmed the lights, and they even served us at the table.
When we pulled up to the McDonald's, the guys thought we were joking, but then when we went in
and they saw what we'd done, they loved it. We all got Chicken McNugget Happy Meals, which
they served us on silver trays. Our server came out to refill our Sprites (in wine glasses)
with one of those coffee pots that says "Do not pour towards face." The guys humorously
fought over the check. And because we got Happy Meals, I still have, somewhere in my old room
in my mom's house, a toy dinosaur holding the blue ribbon from my corsage.
The dance itself was fun, too.
I had campaigned among my peers to be nominated for Prom Queen, and I had actually succeeded in getting
elected to the Prom Court, escorted by Aaron Nicholas in the photo below.
My date knew the band,
and we danced all night and stayed until the end, even though that was totally not the cool thing
to do. We even stopped by the after-Prom party, even though that was not typically my scene. And then
we went back to my dad's house and sat around awkwardly until the sun came up because I didn't know the first thing about how
to go about getting a guy I liked to kiss me. We never went out again, and
the doomed romance that we had in my head never actually occurred, but I treasured the memory of that night for a
long time, taking it as proof that dating can be fun and that guys can be nice and good.
Speaking of nice guys, poor Derik got
quite a scare this morning. He works third shift these days, which means we are mostly relegated to
a cell phone relationship during the week when I have rehearsals in the evenings: I call him
from the car on my way to work as he's getting ready to go to bed (I have a hands-free thingie; don't
call the cops), I call him again on my way home as he's waking up, and then he calls me when he's on
his way to work and I'm getting ready to go to bed. We've gotten used to the rhythm of it. This was our
conversation this morning:
Lindsay:
Mornin', sweetie. How are you?
Derik:
I have the hiccups.
Lindsay:
Oh no, oh no! I just got in a car accident!!!
Derik:
What did you say?
Lindsay:
I said, "Oh no, oh no! I just got in a car accident!!!"
Derik:
What??? Sweetie, where are you?
Lindsay:
Huh?
Derik:
Tell me where you are!
Lindsay:
Oh! No, I'm not really...
Derik:
Lindsay, where are you? Tell me where you are! I'm on my way!
Lindsay:
No, I'm not - I was kidding. I'm not in a car accident. I'm fine. I was just trying
to get rid of your hiccups. You know, by scaring you.
Derik:
WHAT???
Lindsay:
Yeah. Did it work?
Derik:
I can't believe you! You are so lucky you're not home right now because I would come over
and smack you! Don't ever do that to me again! I have never grabbed my keys and run
for the door so fast in my life!
Lindsay:
But I got rid of your hiccups.
Derik:
Yeah, you got rid of my hiccups, but you almost gave me a heart attack!
Lindsay:
I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. See, I've been hanging out with my sister
all weekend, and she would have known I was kidding. Because there's this thing we both
learned when we were kids that's, like, a puzzle, and it's about hiccups. No, wait, the answer is
hiccups. 'Cause there's this guy with a gun, and the thing is, like, why does he have a gun, and the answer is hiccups.
(pause)
Lindsay:
So, you know, every time we have the hiccups, we try to scare each other. But we're not really scared.
Derik:
Just don't ever do that again, OK?
Lindsay:
I promise.
What’s
in my stereo at home:
-
The Donnas - The Donnas Turn 21
What’s
in my car:
What's
in my CD player at work:
What
I'm reading:
- I have to admit, that resolution's not going so well.
I didn't buy a MARTA card this month, and Beloved by Toni Morrison sat in my bookbag for
so long that I had to take it back to the library.
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