Prom: Much more fun at 36 than it was at 17

So my daughter and I have finally joined the Stephenie Meyer bandwagon, thanks to my niece, Megan, who is currently lending us her copy of Twilight. We are only halfway through reading it together. But now that my stomach has resumed being A STOMACH and not A DEMONIC HELLMONSTER, I was compelled to join yet another bandwagon... The People Who Stay Up Partying Till Midnight To Be One Of The First To Buy Stephenie Meyer's Newest Book, Breaking Dawn bandwagon.

Our local library and bookstore always threw coming-out parties for J.K. Rowling's new releases. I blogged about it once. So, to fill Ms. Rowling's vacancy, they've now taken to having coming-out parties for Ms. Meyer's following. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), her following is an eetsy bit more specialized than the Potter Series following. We're talking girls here. Between the ages of 16 and 17. Who like their vampires not so Bram Stokerish. I'd venture to say Toni and I are not within 50 miles of the targeted demographic. And yet light years closer than boys! The two boys (other than Jonah) attending this party were either librarians or CHILDREN of the librarians. So the crowd was small, and my point in mentioning this is to say that, as someone who hasn't read Eclipse yet (the book before Breaking Dawn), I wanted to disappear into the crowd like I did at the last Harry Potter party. I didn't want to OBVIOUSLY be the only other parent there. I didn't want the head librarian walking up to me and saying, "We're kind of short of young people so would you and your children mind joining us for the TRIVIA GAME?? You can be on TEAM VOLTURI!!"

Team whatty?? Twilight doesn't have anything about a VOLTURI by page 163. Needless to say, I knew a grand total of three answers out of approximately 36.

But that's what's to be expected when ignoramuses show up to a book party disguised as DIE HARDS. I allowed Toni to bring some friends with her, and this made it even more obvious that we weren't Twilight Series scholars. Or even..... Twilight Series students. Bless their sweet souls. We didn't do a very good job clueing Toni's friends in about where we were going beforehand. They just knew it was a PARTY that started two hours past their bedtime, a party where there would be food and music and quite possibly TEENAGERS. So when Ms. Head Librarian handed them a ticket at the front door and said, "Now save this, kiddies, because at midnight we're gonna have a drawing for a free copy of the new book," one of the girls responded with, "Did you say BOOK?? What BOOK??"

But all was not lost by our ignorance. The PROM made up for everything. They converted the gymnasium into an empty dance hall where my kids and their friends could kick off their flip-flops without the self-consciousness that comes from being watched by the kids who are three grades above you... seeing as how THOSE kids were too cool for Prom and loitered around the punch bowl and/or big screen TV playing, what else but.... a vampire movie. So Toni and her friends practiced the moonwalk in peace. They made cartwheels. They held hands and twirled in circles and chased around the disco lights like moths. They made me dizzy and giggly and nostalgic. As Toni and her friends laid down their inhibitions almost immediately, I watched as my son stepped to the beat at the edge of the dance floor and ever... so... slowly... to THE MIDDLE of the room. He eventually forgot that he CARES about what his sister and her friends think. And tried to break dance. Before long, he was letting me teach him how to jitterbug. He tried to emulate the head librarian and her husband who were two-stepping. He experimented with THE ROBOT. And that part of my heart that LOATHES sentimentality, it shriveled up and died that night as I stood back and watched my son do The Hustle.