Judy Raymond: Dark side of creating a Cinderella for the ball

COMMENT

The ball season has arrived. Like the duck-shooting season, it has pitfalls to be avoided at all costs if you are to survive.

The exhaustion, the expense, the excess, stretched like one of the limousines sometimes hired to carry these teenage Cinderellas to the ball.

This prom-going ritual must have escaped those of us raised in rural Taranaki. In the olden days we had 21st parties in halls decorated with crossed punga fronds, and went to cabarets.

So it came as an enormous surprise a few years ago when our then sixth-form daughter told us of the New Etiquette. The ball season came of age and us with it.


The What to Wear blues. After dragging round all the second-hand ball dress emporiums, we were both tetchy.

"I'll sew a dress for you," I suggested. She looked horrified.

"I sewed all my clothes in the '70s," I said defensively.

"It's not the hippy look I'm after."

Still, we ended up in a fabric shop and spent hours hovering between pattern books and bolts of expensive fabric.

The salesman drooled over the fabric my daughter finally chose. He described it as having the hypnotic qualities of moonlight shining on a Venetian canal.

Then came the construction of the garment. The fabric slid like moonlit canal water under my old Bernina (yes, circa 1970) and ended up on the floor.

The local dressmaker was called upon at the 11th hour and cash changed hands.

Then came the hair, makeup and manicure. The afternoon of the ball was spent at the hairdressers and beauty parlour. Four hours later, someone arrived back - possibly our daughter, looking 10 years older with drag-queen eyes, pouting lips and hair in gravity-defying shapes. Her fingers had sprung nail extensions.

"Ping" went the cash register again. My plastic was getting bent out of shape.

I won't go into the Before-ball Bashes, the Afterball Action and the Champagne Dawnbusters. Although, as they leave in their gilded carriages, I wonder if it would be easier to approach the ball season with a son - a hired suit and a tie and they are set to go. The lads these sophisticated young ladies take with them, like well-groomed accessories, look so much younger.

A year along the track, reason took over. We all became Ballwise and Budget Conscious. A fellow art student designed and made the dresses. The girls bought the fabric and did their own hair and makeup.

It was all innovation, and relatively stress-free. A friend's daughter borrowed a vintage frock and was transformed into a 1940s movie star.

So getting this ball thing right takes practice. Now I'll just go and reminisce over that photo of me and my first boyfriend in front of a punga frond. * Judy Raymond is a Herald reader from Mt Eden.



* Do you want to get something off your chest? Send us a 400-word comment, including your name and phone number. Pieces written with humour and insight are preferred.
* Email the Herald News Desk