Saturday, May 16, 2009

Prom 2009

As Student Government sponsor, one of the most fun and simultaneously most stressful parts of my job is planning the high school Prom. It's intimidating becuase year after year I'm challenged with making it fun, "cool", etc., etc. This year we had planned to have Prom at GlenEagles Country Club in west Plano, but at the last minute the students informed me that they didn't want to have a "country clubby" prom :) So... I set off on the task to find something (as they described it) "urban" and "upscale" (they watch WAY too much The Hills). I found a place by Fair Park called Three Three Three First Avenue, which is a really cool loft space - the only trouble was that it was a completely blank canvas, and although I tout myself to be a pretty involved sponsor, I simply didn't have the time to rent chairs, linens, sound equipment, lighting, etc., etc., etc. so I called in the professionals at Cymbidium and let Robin there take over. She came out to MCA and met with the kids a couple of times and they decided on a "neon" theme (I guess that's as "un-country clubby" as you can get, right?). It was AWESOME for me, because I didn't have to do ANYTHING (except get the school to write the big check) which is quite a departure from what I've done in the past (making flower arrangements, picking up a "prom cake"...). Anyway, it was the highest attended Prom EVER (117! YAY!) and we met our goal of making it a Prom that would make their public school friends jealous :) I was going to wait until I got my pics from Cymbidium (b/c they're going to be MUCH better than mine), but I figured I'd go ahead and post these in the mean time:

The above pictures show our Vitamin Water bar, the location and one of the orchid centerpieces with our tie-dyed linens


For the first 45 minutes or so we held the kids downstairs for "mocktail hour" (no, we never officially called it that... I would have had 85 parent emails) where the kids walked the pink carpet, had their pics taken in front of our logo sign (Cymbidium designed our custom logo for us... see the Dallas skyline in the back???), got to drink passed vitamin water drinks, and hopefully get all the awkward "hellos", "I love your dress", "you look so pretty" out of the way so that when we let them upstairs they would be ready to dance... The students spent the entire time dancing like private christian school kids and I only had to remind a couple of them to "leave room for Jesus" :) Our event designer Robyn and her staff (you can see Robyn with the neon shoelaces in the picture below) led the kids in the Cupid Shuffle and after a little "talking-to" by me, the DJ ended up doing a really good job (as the students were coming upstairs he wanted to play the Chicago Bulls entrance???? What the heck is that?!?!). He was a close-talker which was a little bit awkward, but his name was Luke so I had to give him points for that:

As kids were leaving we had a GIANT candy/frappuccino/flavored popcorn station set up so that they could grab a bunch of sugar for the ride home, but as you can see from the picture on the right they didn't take enough and I ended up hauling an entire trunkload of candy and popcorn (and our giant logo sign) home with me. Judging by the facebook status updates: "so and so just got home from the BEST Prom ever", "My prom was WAY better than your prom", etc. I'd say that everyone had a great time. I'm just glad that it's over and that I made it home in one piece (I took a wrong turn getting back to the highway and ended up in the part of Fair Park you don't want to be in at 1:00 a.m).
It's going to be hard to top next year, but I already have some ideas floating around. Hope you enjoyed this flashback to high school as much as I did (becuase my Proms were NEVER this cool!!!)

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