This is the second in a two-part series on everything you need to know about being a parent of a student attending “The Eighth Grade Dance”.
This week: Things that can and did go wrong.
I’ve heard a bunch of great stories this week about the Eight Grade Dance, and I’ve had a hard time picking out the best ones to tell you. If you know any good ones, email me and maybe I’ll do another column on “stuff that goes wrong”.
There was one girl whose heel on her new shoes ripped the lining on her new dress just after she got dressed. One girl went to have her hair done and her hairdresser had left town. One girl’s new fingernails were cut in the shape of inverted half-moons and sort of looked wicked (she went home and cut them off). One girl discovered faint stains all down the front of her dress ten minutes before her date was to arrive. She and both parents were in the restroom madly dabbing and blow drying when the doorbell rang.
My favorite story, though, is the one about the mother who repeatedly reminded her son to go by the florist to pick up his date’s corsage. “Put it in the refrigerator when you get home!” she added.
When she got home, she first thing she did was check the refrigerator … and the flowers were not there. She drove to the baseball game he was playing in, pulled him aside and said, “Where are the flowers?! Did you forget?!”
“I got ‘em,” he explained, “and I put them in the refrigerator just like you said.”
Feeling a little foolish, she drove back home, and looked in the refrigerator again. The flowers were not there.
She raced back up to the ballpark, this time a little angry. “WHERE in the refrigerator are they?” she implored. “I’ve looked everywhere, and they are NOT there!”
“In the top part,” he answered. He had put them in the freezer. I guess if you don’t know any better, it would seem that the freezer would “keep” things for a long time.
She rushed back home, hoping to salvage the flowers, but it was too late. They were frozen and very brown. Some mothers would have cried and some mothers would have just shrugged and said, “Oh, well”.
But this mother was determined that her son’s date would have a corsage. She called every florist in the county until she found one that had three roses left.
The girl had a really nice corsage. The boy will never put flowers in the freezer again.
