THE SCHOOL PROM: A BATTLEGROUND

high school prom The high-school prom is an essential rite of passage in America, whereby all of the traumas and triumphs of youth boil over in a night of excess. The point, illustrated best by the late John Hughes, is to drink illegally, dance stupidly, discover the jock loved you all along but the dork is more lovable, and then, perhaps, lose your virginity. The idea is to experience some premature nostalgia for mis-spent youth, while generating revenue for the rental-tux business.

Given how hard it is already for American teenagers to find a date and a suitable ensemble for this dramatic evening, it was good for a Mississippi high school to make explicit provisions in a memorandum to students:

1. Dates must be of the opposite sex;

2. Only male students are allowed to wear tuxedos.

The problem is that an 18-year-old student named Constance McMillen wants to bring her girlfriend to the prom and wear a tuxedo. She, with back-up from the American Civil Liberties Union, demanded that the school change this prom policy; the school decided to cancel it altogether, reports CNN.

"I never thought the school would try to cancel the prom and hurt everyone just to keep me and my girlfriend from going together," McMillen said in an ACLU news release.

It is good to know that the prom is still a place of drama, a battleground for misfits v squares. Hopefully, if the ACLU gets its way, the hard-working future graduates of Itawamba Agricultural High School will get to dance, too.

Picture credit: emdot (via Flickr)