Prom + Zombies = Prombies!

By Lisa Fary

My favorite parts of my high school proms were trying on dresses and getting my hair done.  I didn’t particularly like actually going to the prom.   It was just fun to wear a pretty dress that swirls, make-up, and magenta glitter nails.

For my junior prom, I went traditional with a plain black crepe dress from Merry-Go-Round, white elbow gloves, and a French twist. I went with Kenneth, a friend from French class who couldn’t get anyone in his entire senior class to be his date.  We doubled with my marching band’s drum major and his date, Aimee.  After dinner and about two hours at the prom (during which Aimee and I sat a table while the boys ran off), we all went for a round of Putt-Putt in our formal grab.

My senior prom was a bit different – I was feeling dark and depressed, and that bled in my prom look.  Black lace dress, platform shoes, giant silver dragon necklace, and my hair. . oh god, my hair.  It took seventy bobby pins to hold up that mess.  The hairdresser called it “goth-y bouffant”; mom called it “rat’s nest”.

I sat at a table with Aimee – we’d become best friends by then – and our co-ed group of stag prom goers, mocking the Prom King and Queen until we got bored and went back to my house for snacks and movies.  We wound up having a Tommy sing-a-long.

The only thing that could have made senior prom better was if I had been wearing zombie make-up. Luckily, I got to make up for that recently at Philadelphia’s Zombie Prom.

The concept was simple: dress like a zombie going to prom, show up at the venue, and have some undead fun.  But like any prom, for me, Zombie Prom was all about the dressing up.

Zombie Prom was my chance to rectify my prom dress history and finally get that Gunne Sax or Jessica McClintock dress I always wanted: poofy, floor length, hot pink, maybe with sequins or beads.  Or maybe iridescent taffeta! The kind of tacky thing that, at age twelve, I imagined myself wearing at my own prom, only to be thwarted by fashion trends of the 1990s.

I thrifted for days only to find more of what I faced in the mid-1990s. Finally, on the second floor of the Philly AIDS Thrift, hidden among the dollar rack, I found my dress. It was navy instead of sequined hot pink, but it was a floor length Jessica McClintock and it did have a poofy hemline (sort of).  It was also four sizes too big and about twelve inches too long, but for the low low price of one dollar, I could fix that.

Finding a tacky prom coat for John was harder. He’d hoped for something in velvet or plaid, or maybe something in powder blue with a ruffled shirt.  No such luck, although I did find a pretty bad, multi-colored pinstripe sport coat (25 cents!) and a guacamole green polyester shirt for him.

Zombie Prom was also the time to rethink my prom make-up. Junior year was the classy, subtle year when I only wore pink lipstick, blush, and some brown mascara.  Senior year was the more misguided year – I piled on black eye makeup and a drugstore knock off of Chanel’s Vamp lipstick.

Yeah. . . zombie make-up is better.

I chose the skin tone and pallor of the freshly dead, possibly freshly dead of natural causes, but the toilet paper gashes on my arm, neck and chest could have been ice pick related.  Even though my skin was greenish and my face was bruised, I looked a hell of a lot more natural than I did at my senior prom.

Since I was undead, my hair could be pretty simple for this prom.  No seventy-bobby pin bouffants for this zombie.  I mixed a handful of pomade with green make-up and smeared it through my hair for a stringy, mossy mess.

John went for a classic, Romero-meets-Zombie Lake look.  He glued toilet paper to his face then covered it all with straight green from the tube.  After blacking out his eyes and squirting on some blood, he was set.

The Zombie Prom itself was about as eventful as my other proms: John and I sat at a table, talked to friends, and drank beer.  Except at Zombie Prom, it was socially acceptable for me to be stiff and awkward and to eat a chocolate eyeball without taking off the wrapper.  It’s what a zombie would do.

Never miss an update. Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email or subscribe via RSS

Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

Related Stuff: