How to do prom Over the Rainbow

You’re going to be totally jealous when I tell you this, but I get to go to prom tonight!!  (Oh, maybe not?  I know the word “prom” coming from a “grown-up” may sound pretty silly, but hey.)  I am going to dance with gentlemen in tuxes and dresses as well as ladies in tuxes and dresses.  And I am going to love every second of it.

Our LGBT center at our local 4-year institution is holding a LGBTQA prom called Over The Rainbow.  I’m not sure about your prom experiences, but mine were pretty basic.  If my scanner was working, I’d show you the pink dresses I wore (I did have totally kickass pink satin pumps for my senior prom) and the badness of my high school hair.  Instead, I’m going to show you my dress and shoes for tonight, which are 1000x better than those other prom get-ups.

This picture doesn’t do justice to the dress (and both pix are slightly blurry, sorry).  It’s a combination of satin, stretch, and taffeta, and I LOVE IT.  I wore it to an awards banquet, and even that felt like prom, because my dress was so cool.  There’s even a tiny crinoline under the skirt!  I have blue glitter toenail polish, too.  Once I  jazz up the makeup, I will be SO prom-ready.  Are you jealous yet?

This is how prom is supposed to be: good food for munching, good tunes to dance to, and good people to hang out and dance with.  The people you WANT to dance with.  And that’s how Over the Rainbow will be.  If a person is a prom-goer, a person deserves a safe space to have fun and look adorable and canoodle with their date.  Haters, step off.  Like way the fuck off.

Back to working on the toenails.  Glitter polish is almost impossible to spread evenly.  Then I’m going to go stare at my dress and shoes and dream about dancing with a beautiful woman in a tux, and a gorgeous man in ruffles.  Ah, prom fantasies.

And if my husband comes along, I might dance with him, too.

EDITED TO ADD: I didn’t mean to be exclusionary by writing about ladies and gentlemen in tuxes and dresses.  Some folks don’t do the gender binary.  My hasty post should have included the fact that I’ll dance with anyone who asks me: man, woman, or someone who checks both boxes (or neither box).

This post does assume people will ask me to dance, and that could be a hasty generalization.  If nobody does, then it will be just like my high school proms.  : (  And then it will be fodder for a YA novel.  : )