I don't know how wide spread the practice of asking someone to a
dance with an elaborate arts and crafts project is but in our high
school it was all but mandatory. It was considered poor form indeed
to just walk up and ask your date out and worse still was to call and
ask. It was expected that you would do something like put balloons in
their room with notes and confetti, or trash their car with soap and
streamers with a note. After someone had been vandalized for the
asking a return prank was in order. Maybe to accept a date a girl
would stuff your locker full of packing peanuts with a note riffing
on the material used to make the mess. Something like ,”I would be
“NUTS” to not go to prom with you.” It was good messy fun for
those kids involved and torture to see what the cool kids got while
your locker remained clean, well – cleaner. My girlfriend was
excited to ask me out to a girls choice dance and I was still trying
to find a way to let her down easy. She chose to destroy my car with
cuteness and it was full of confetti, balloons and candy with a note
that asked to to go with her to the dance. I resigned myself to
making a reply and purchased a pumpkin and a bag of tootsie rolls. I
wrote a note accepting her offer on one of the tootsie roll wrappers
and then emptied the rest of the bag into the hollowed out pumpkin. I
was not really aware that the hot wet interior of a hollow pumpkin
would liquefy the candy into a soupy mess that ran out when the
pumpkin tipped over but a little chocolatey pumpkin juice on your
carpet probably only makes you feel more special. She never found the
note in that train wreck of an answer but she assumed that I had said
yes. I had.
