By Carol van Strum
Way back in the Pleistocene, when my sister was graduating from high school in the mid-1950s, the school announced plans to cancel the senior prom because there was no way to control the drinking kids did at and after it.
My dad, with the naivete of common sense, made the front page of The New York Times when he suggested at a school board meeting that parents actually serve booze in the parking lot and thereby control how much anyone drank. You would’ve thought he suggested rape and murder, there was such an outcry.
Shortly after the news article appeared, he came home from work and asked us if we knew of someone named Bill Haley.
My dad’s idea of music was playing Strauss waltzes and ragtime on the piano; he hadn’t a clue who Bill Haley was. Haley (of Bill Haley & the Comets) had called my dad after reading the article and offered a deal: he would bring Fats Domino and other current hit bands to the prom if the kids agreed not to drink. And that’s what happened — it was a prom no one would ever forget, and who the hell needs to drink when you’ve got Fats Domino?
Now it’s 2010. School officials in Fulton, Mississippi recently forbade a lesbian student from attending the senior prom at Itawamba Agricultural High School with her girlfriend (also a student there), or to wear a tuxedo to the prom. In response to a letter from The American Civil Liberties Union asking the school board to reconsider, the school board instead announced that they were canceling the prom altogether. Thus, the school not only punishes all students in order to deny one student’s rights, but doubly punishes McMillen by turning her classmates against her.