Prom dress

A friend from my current life discovered this photo of me in the "Photos of Nora" section of my Facebook page. Graciously scanned, uploaded, and tagged by someone from high school with nary a thought to my consent. "I'll never forget Nora's dress!!!!!" it says.

So my friend's all, NORA. TELL ME ABOUT THAT DRESS.

I'm all, what? I made it.

She's all, you have to blog about it.

And I'm all, bah, I had a bad day. No chance.

She's all no, you really have to blog about it.

And I'm all, what? I made it. It was 1991. What else is there?

And then, THEN, she gave me quite possibly the best compliment of my entire life, itself worthy of a blog post. And I quote:

It's like 1991 synthesized into ONE SINGLE DRESS.
It looks like opening credits to Saved By the Bell AS A DRESS.
It's like the L'Oreal spray gel bottle AS A DRESS.

So, okay. Give me a compliment and I'm anyone's, that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. So here is the nonstory. I was all into sewing there for a bit. And I was all into being, you know, weird. Never one for pastels, more for either browns or brights, I wanted to branch out a bit from the gowns that were in fashion then. Some girl in my school had made her prom dress several years earlier out of camouflage material and looked pretty awesome--but I was never much into the camouflage or the hunting (this was rural Pennsylvania, where the first day of hunting season is practically a state holiday). To outdo the camo chick I deemed it not enough to make my own dress out of some fabric from the store, so I decided to make my own. Not with a loom and all, that would be a bit beyond my crafty capabilities. So somehow, in the half-assed way that I do, I sort of came up with this idea standing in the fabric store, why don't I make some sort of patchwork thingy, and then sew the dress out of THAT. Then lickety split before you know it I bought several colors, hoping it was enough to make a dress, and went to town. I had committed. It was, like my life, disorganized and chaotic but came together somehow.

It was sort of fun, patchworking the fabric together and then making a dress. It was sort of dumb, too. I had many, many moments of regret about not just buying a pink tulle thingy like everybody else. I actually look nice in pink, as it turns out. I don't know where my family was, letting me make that thing without telling me I was an idiot. They probably thought I was being creative or something. A dangerous thing for high school, for sure. Don't they know that blending in is way better?

(I had also, the year before, made a sweet orange and black polka dot number for the junior prom--asymmetrical hem, naturally. But I don't have a picture of that, and thank heavens no one has put one on Facebook.)

My date? We had broken up a few weeks before, but decided to go anyway. Awkward. (His mother's name was Nora, hmm). But I made him a stupid cummerbund anway. The theme? Remember how every prom had a THEME? It was something about the first Gulf War, not very romantic. And my hair? Wasn't it cute?

Oh, and the fabric? Velvet.