Salon.com > Prom

Pic of the day: Barack Obama at prom

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:10:00 +0000

TIME Magazine obtained and published this picture of President Obama the night of his senior prom in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1979, from his classmate Kelli Allman.

From TIME's press release on the picture:

Pictured left to right in the attached photo: Greg Orme (Allman's date and Obama's friend), Allman, Obama and Obama's date Megan Hughes.

TIME is also releasing a note Obama wrote in Allman's yearbook at the end of his senior year that reads, in part, "You are extremely sweet and foxy, I don't know why Greg would want to spend any time with me at all! You really deserve better than clowns like us; you even laugh at my jokes!"

Read the full story here.

Indiana group fights for “gay-free” prom

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 13:54:00 +0000

After failing to ban gay teens from attending Sullivan County High School's official prom, a group of Indiana parents, students and a local teacher is fighting for a separate "traditional" prom that would keep gay kids out.

The move sparked national outrage, and now officials at the high school are trying to distance themselves from those planning the gay-free fête.

In an interview with local NBC affiliate WTWO, principal David Springer made clear that the "traditional" prom committee was an independent group and that the school had no involvement. He also said that all students will be welcome at the official prom in the Spring: "Anybody can go to the prom... Of course, a girl could go out with another girl if they didn't have a date or that was their choice."

The church that hosted the anti-gay prom organizers has also come under fire for their involvement: "Our church has no involvement in this whatsoever. It's a community thing where people have met here," Pastor Dale Wise at Sullivan First Christian Church told Indiana's WTHR.

“Prom” and the bland, creeping evil of girl culture

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 01:01:00 +0000

Here's what I want to know about "prom." Not the new Disney movie "Prom," which is a would-be tween-oriented hit so scrubbed and sanitized and not worthy of paying attention to that it can barely be said to exist at all. I want to know when the senior prom, the ritual pre-graduation party involving corsages and limousines and (in my day) hilarious feathered hairdos and tuxedos in unnatural pastel shades of polyester with enormous foldover lapels, lost its definite article. (At my school it was actually called the senior ball -- the prom was for juniors -- and I don't think I know anybody who physically attended it. But let's move on before I start bawling about the girl I didn't ask who is now a prominent anthropologist.)

Anyway, in normal American speech it was once called "the prom" or "the senior prom"; these days "Prom" seems to have become a trademarked proper noun, and also a subset or metastatic offshoot of the corporatized girl-culture that brought us the princess craze. I suppose if my daughter (who is 7) had heard about Disney's "Prom" and wanted to see it, I'd let her go, with kind of a sinking feeling just below my solar plexus. First of all, it wouldn't make much of an impression on her because it's so boring, and second of all, it would strike her as a story set among a Stepfordian alien civilization, one with similar artifacts to our own but entirely different folkways and hairstyles.