You Should Totally Do This Too

Remember when I tried to ebay my various formal dresses?

Here's how that went.  I sold the full-skirted black one and about broke even on all the listing fees and on the shipping.  I sold the short one with the gold sleeves, but the buyer turned out to be some flakey teenager and she never paid me.  So I got rid of one dress for no profit and I ended up, after all this time having to move the rest of those silly dresses to Chicago.

Yesterday, in a bit of browsing for good Strollerderby stories, I came across this charity that provides prom dresses to local high school girls who can't afford to buy new ones.  I immediately boxed up my remaining dresses (plus a couple of others I have recently--ahem--outgrown) and mailed them off to the Glass Slipper Project.  It happens to be a Chicago-area organization, but you can donate no matter where you are.  They take dresses, shoes, handbags, makeup (only new, unopened makeup) and other formalwear "necessities" for girls who want to attend prom.

Full disclosure: I never went to a prom until I chaperoned one while teaching high school.  I never wanted to attend a prom.  At my all-girls' high school, prom would have meant a big expenditure of hard-earned money for a date with someone's cousin and an evening of music the majority of girls at my school (very much not my friends and I) thought was cool in 1988.

My friends all decided to throw an "alternative prom" instead.  We did "bubble gum, bubble gum, in a dish" to determine the prom queen and I won, after the contest got narrowed to my best friend and me, and when I got to call the number of bubble gum pieces, I quickly counted in my head to determine if odds or evens would win and called it.  So I cheated my best friend out of prom queen, you could say.

The king was one of four males in attendance, and my favorite high school teacher.  So that was fun.

But just because prom is not my bag doesn't mean it isn't perfectly legit for prom to be some other girl's Biggest Event Ever.  And that other girl deserves to be a queen in her own right, so give early and give often to the Glass Slipper Project, folks!

Comments

[mijk]

It is one thing to decide not to got to the prom and quite another to not be able to go..