What would Kurt and the Glee Club make of it -?

Username:
Password:

Posted on: 19/03/2010 by dev666 0 Comments

Just recently I read on the Care2 site ( I'm sure it'll be other places as well, and I have no clue how to put links in, or whatever you call them, sorry ) about an 18 yr-old high school student in Mississippi whose school has decided they would rather cancel the Senior Prom Night than allow her to bring her girlfriend to the shindig. As if this " It's my ball and I'm not playing!" reaction were not childish enough, they also don't want any girls wearing tuxedos. Yes, because we all know that as soon as a girl wears a tux, she immediately turns into a lesbian, clothing being evil that way. The whole thing has sparked a major debate over human rights and discrimination across the Pond.

Speaking as one for whom school was an eleven year-long waking nightmare, the very idea of Prom Night is enough to bring me out in shuddering and nausea. It may be the one small mercy of my schooldays that this was not something yet discovered in the UK and so we were not forced to endure it. I can, however, too easily imagine how it might well have gone ...

Attendance would have been compulsory, of course. There was no such thing as a 'voluntary social event', or no one would have turned up. To get out of going one would have needed to deliberately break a leg, at least a leg, maybe an arm too, just to be certain that you wouldn't be expected to come along on crutches. Our Headmistress, who was very progressive in her approach to teaching and yet retained a bewilderingly old-fashioned view of social matters, would have made us learn such dancing delights as 'the Alley cat' and 'the Slosh' ( I don't know what these things should look like when performed, so don't ask ), and the wearing of dresses involving much pink and frills for girls would have been as mandatory as the attendance. That any girl would even dream of wearing a tuxedo would have been looked upon with considerably less benevolence than, say, smashing every window in the school. As for taking along your same-sex partner ... such a thing would have brought the men in the white coats running with their biggest butterfly nets. The '70's and the '80's were not renowned for their appreciation of the human rights of school pupils. Hey, we were made to drink milk from little triangular cardboard cartons that was freezing in winter and warm in summer and always managed to taste like the cow had pooped in it. Human rights? Yeah, right.

Anyway, today the school system is at least somewhat more enlightened, although it still has a-ways to go apparently before it drags itself completely into the light of the 21st century if there exist yet schools which think all female students should wear pink frilly dresses and all male students should, presumably, not wear pink frilly dresses. With a TV show like 'Glee' gathering such huge ratings and an army of fans, with its joyous celebration of all things gay and geeky, it's sad that the reality for some school students should still be one of such opposites. On the upside for the young lady at the centre of the Mississippi fracas, support for her from the other students has been strong, and a plethora of local businesses have stepped in with offers to host a Senior Prom for free. That way they'll probably end up getting a better shindig than anything the school would have allowed - at least there won't be any teachers marching around with tape measures making sure everyone stays a foot apart during the slow dances!