Neal Rubin: Here's where to share your prom story ― or take another whack at the dance

Chris Lambert lived in northern Indiana when he met his prom date on spring break in Florida. She drove down from Michigan a month later for the dance, and when she showed up at the door, his dad pulled him aside.

"As serious as can be," Lambert says, "he asked me, 'What strip club did you find her in?'"

That turned out to be their only date, but at least they made it to prom. Omari Taylor didn't even get to buy a corsage.

Taylor, a Denby High grad, "grew up in a religious home," he explains. "We didn't really do prom."

He'll make up for it May 13 — and Lambert, 43, will finally get to a prom with someone his dad approves of.

He's the CEO of a Detroit nonprofit called Life Remodeled. Taylor, 45, is the chief development officer. Its headquarters is a repurposed school, which makes the fundraiser there next month not only adroitly named, but ideal for the place and season: Prom Remodeled.

Picture tuxedos, ball gowns and crepe paper streamers, but without the pressure and expectations. Food from places like Baobab Fare and SheWolf, and top-end beverages, instead of punch that your most obnoxious friend tries to spike with Mohawk vodka. Live music from the Gin Blossoms and Montell Jordan, rather than the first garage band willing to play four hours for $150.

“It’s one of the most fascinating conversation starters I’ve ever used — ‘Tell me about your prom,’ ” Lambert says. “You almost always see this visceral reaction. Eyes rolling up, a look of dread, a smirk, a deep sigh.”

Oh, what a night

I've posed that question to large gatherings, and the show of hands for "best night of my life" remains at zero. For "borderline disaster," it always looks like a throng of people are trying to hail taxis in the rain.

Momentarily, I'll be asking you to waltz through your memories and share a story. But allow me to prime the pump with my friend Charlie Beecher in Nevada, whose date informed him that she could only stay at the dance for an hour because her real boyfriend was home from the Army and he wanted to go out.

Or my son Spencer, who wound up being driven home from the Roostertail by a vice-principal because one of his friends had been so thunderously drunk on the inbound party bus that the driver refused to come back.

Or Devin Scillian of WDIV-TV (Channel 4), who was dating the girl next door in Junction City, Kan., but wound up committing to prom with someone else because his future wife Corey was off at college ... except then a family issue brought Corey home for a semester and in the middle of the chaos he kept his promise to take a lovely young lady named Susan to the dance.

"A hot mess," Scillian says — and how was your night?

Tell Neal all about it

I hope it was splendid, but odds are there were, um, certain imperfections. If you'd be kind enough to pass along your prom stories, good or bad, in an email to NARubin@freepress.com or via Twitter at @nealrubin_fp, I'd love to read them, and then share your experiences with the class a week or two down the road.

Prom, after all, is one of the few things we have in these divided times that's still a universal, or close to it. Even a decision to skip it is distinctive part of high school.

At its worst, prom is a costly, artificial situation that’s often a first date or last date, awash in camera-pointing parents and fraught with uncertainty, even in the recent fortunate decades where invitations can be extended with a text message instead of a quavery-voiced phone call.

At its best, prom is still all of those things, but there's a good-night kiss.

My prom weekend involved two tuxedo rentals — the first specimen was too ghastly to wear, even for a teenager in the 1970s — followed by a restaurant kitchen flood that made us late to the dance, and a sleep-deprived fender-bender on my way home from work the next day.

Still wearing my snappy double-breasted Edwardian with a ruffled shirt, I'd been the best-dressed shoe salesman in the entire mall. It's unclear whether that's a good memory, or something to wipe away.

Prom tales in proximity

Betsy Crapps of South Lyon went to three proms in high school and has been to more than two dozen since, in multiple states. That's a good thing.

Matt Friedman of West Bloomfield felt so guilty about his prom experience that he tracked down his date to apologize and wound up annoying renowned public radio host Ira Glass. That's a good thing, too, or at least a good story.

We'll get back to them. First, Life Remodeled's Lambert has some stories he didn’t have to go further than a committee meeting to find.

One associate, for instance, said the only thing he remembered about prom night was getting his chewing gum stuck in his date’s hair during a dance. When the song ended, so did the date.

Life Remodeled COO Diallo Smith asked a girl to prom in high school and was shut down. He wound up marrying her, and she'll finally go to a prom with him in two weeks.

Lambert's wife, Andrea, grew up in a home where dancing was considered a sin. This will be her first prom, though realistically, he says, neither of them dances often or with great elan.

There should be plenty of other things to occupy their time.

Finding the Lord and founding the charity

Lambert set out to be a real estate lawyer and make stacks of money. Then he spent a college semester in Australia and had what he calls "a radical encounter with God."

Returning to Indiana University, he found that his three closest fraternity brothers had experienced the same epiphany, and so had his drug dealer. He became a pastor, worked for a bit in Africa, and decided that if Jesus spent most of his time with people who were marginalized and oppressed, so could he.

Life Remodeled was founded in 2010, “very intentionally not as a religious organization.”

It focuses on math and reading programs, health and wellness services, development and job training. Its headquarters, the Durfee Innovation Society, is located in the former Durfee Elementary-Middle School, which turns out to be well configured for a $350-per-ticket grown-up formal.

Festivities will be spread across the gym, auditorium and former pool, now topped with a floor. In lieu of an emcee, a principal will make announcements over the public address system.

At other organizations' events, Lambert says, “I don’t want to sit at a table for an hour and hear speeches. I just don’t.”

His plan is to start talking, and then shut up, in the five-minute gap between musical acts. Better to surround people with the mission, he says, then preach about it.

If everything goes right, the charity will clear $250,000. Down the road, he's looking for $1 million a year.

Thinking long term, Taylor, the development director, says he's going to buy a tux and shiny shoes rather than rent them.

With every dance that goes by, the better a bargain they become ― and when you have to wait a quarter-century for your prom, you want to jump in with both feet.

Old dresses and old regrets

Crapps went to three proms during her high school years in Rochester, New York, and assumed she had left them behind her. Then her mom downsized to a condo and arrived up for a visit with all three of Crapps' dresses in the back seat.

That spawned a riotous evening with 11 friends in tacky gowns at a Buca di Beppo, which in turn led to Mom Prom, a supposed one-shot event at her Canton church that has since become thousands of dances in the U.S. and beyond raising millions of dollars for charity.

“My girlfriend who was just here at my (Canton) prom is in her 70s,” says Crapps, 53. “She says this prom was way better than 1966, that prom she went to with whatshisname.

“There’s no worries. It’s not pretentious. It’s just a celebration. Nobody’s judging.”

Back to those stories

The only one judging Friedman turned out to be himself.

He went to the 1990 Bloomfield Hills Andover prom with a classmate named Tami who had been one of the ringleaders on the planning committee.

“My friends and I were a bunch of 18-year-olds more interested in the hotel room, the limo and maybe some illicit beverages than the actual prom,” Friedman says. “We got there with basically enough time left to take a picture. My date essentially missed the event she spent the whole year planning.”

Fast-forward 15 years, and NBC came out with a program called “My Name Is Earl” whose title character was a lifelong scuzzball trying to make amends to a list of people he had wronged.

Duly inspired, Friedman emailed a mea culpa to his prom date in New York City and offered to take her to dinner ― with his wife ― the next time she was in Michigan.

Heavens, Tami wrote back, more or less. We were kids and it was a long time ago, and there’s no apology needed.

Then a month or two later, he got a call from a producer for “This American Life,” Glass’ long-running program on NPR. It turned out Tami’s sister worked on the show, and Glass was intrigued.

The problem was that Friedman was not Earl, wandering the land doing good deeds, and Glass grew increasingly peeved as he sat at his microphone in Chicago and Friedman sat in a rented studio in Farmington Hills.

No, Friedman kept saying, he didn't have a list. He just felt bad about the prom.

“So,” Glass grumbled, “you’ve never done anything else wrong in your life?” Then he walked out of his studio and abandoned the interview.

Friedman's segment never made it on the air, but that's OK. Now he has two prom stories instead of one.

Neal Rubin is eagerly awaiting prom stories at NARubin@freepress.com, and promises he won't stalk off halfway through reading them. He'll spend Sunday morning at Laurel Park Place on the final day of Bookstock, Michigan's largest charity used book and media sale, then head to the Michigan Science Center to moderate a discussion with director Keith Famie after a 2 p.m. screening of "Detroit: The City of Churches" in the Freep Film Festival.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Neal Rubin: Here's where to share your prom story ― or relive the night