My last prom?

It's prom time again at Jess' school. I helped around with whatever I could in the afternoon and set up my now traditional photo booth.

Just prior to the afternoon I rushed out and bought myself a new Photo Printer which was much, much easier to carry around, slightly faster (1 minute per photo) and serves as both the memory card reader and printer in one. It will go very well in our living room with the rest of the new home media centre...

The doors opened at 19:00 and they were very, very slow to get started this year. The kids seemed to take a very long time to get in to the party mood and the DJ playing 70s and 80s tunes (Kool & The Gang, Saturday Night Fever, Marvin Gaye, Jackson 5, KC & The Sunshine Band), which I quite like in other circumstances, certainly was not helping.

However all of a sudden it burst in to party mode and there were 250 kids dancing their hearts out and a combination of a DJ, a live rock band made up of a group of graduating students who played about 4 songs and a couple of rappers who performed a couple of songs.

The photo booth suddenly exploded and everyone wanted their picture taken. This year's theme was Hollywood and Cannes and we had a pseydo-Oscar ceremony backdrop. It was a lot of fun. However it became obvious quickly that I wasn't going to have time to shoot all the photos, crop and retouch them (red eyes all over the place) and print them out (1 minute per photo) if I kept taking pictures too late. To the great chagrin of quite a lot rapidly becoming obnoxious teenagers we stopped shooting pictures at about 21:45 and I spent the rest of the night retouching and cropping and printing non-stop like a machine.

The prom ended at midnight as planned. However we ended the night with everyone having put everything away and a group of partygoers staring at my printer as it was slowly but surely still cranking out photos until 1:00 in the morning. It was quite frustrating.

As the editor of the yearbook had to hang around until I was completely finished so I could give her a CD-ROM with all of the photos on it she missed the last métro home. I therefore drove her and a couple of her friends home at 1:00 in the morning and was quite astonished, impressed and pleased to see so many people hanging out in the streets and partying on a Saturday night. It's amazing the effect warm weather can have on Parisians... it's been a long time since I was out so late... it felt great.

This is probably my last prom as a participating parent in the "main room" as this is Jessica's last year in collège (Junior High School) and next year she too will be a Lycée (Hight School) student and it will be her prom as well. At our school all of Lycée goes to the prom every year so Lycée students get 3 proms! Generally a parent of a Lycée student is not allowed in the main room with the other Lycée students during the prom party.

I might pull rank if I'm still the President of the Parents' Association... but I doubt it.