The Ishtar of prom nights

We decided to give the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Party a try Monday night but clicked on at the start of Warren Beatty’s lifetime something award and the result was like putting plastic dry-cleaning bags over our heads and taking a deep breath. How did this guy talk his way into the pants of Joan Collins, Leslie Caron, Brigitte Bardot, Carly Simon, Candice Bergen, Cher, and Britt Ekland? He was up there for 15 minutes, stuttering along and doing Borat impersonations, for Clyde Barrow’s sake. Terrible.

On the upside, though, I no longer have a nagging feeling that I let Warren Beatty down.

You see, Warren is a proud son of my hometown. After the prom at the end my junior year, and being the crunchy granolas we were, a bunch of us on the crew team camped out in the backyard of the house where he grew up. Our location in the lover-boy’s lawn, along with the spirited mood due to the school year’s finality, naturally lent itself toward love.

But I couldn’t pull the trigger. It was my first date with this girl and she had two terrible cold sores that night. I wasn’t going to risk getting any sort of mouth grossness going into the last year of what I correctly predicted was the pinnacle of my social life. She was as senior going off to some Ivy League; I was a junior going off to be the greatest lover our town had seen since Beatty himself. There was no kissy-face to be had that night.

Yet, I still felt like I hadn’t done right by Warren. He would have closed the deal, no matter what he’d learned from Coach Bruce in health class, and his has shadow has haunted me to my grave. But not no more, as Coach would have said. Not after that wretched excuse of an acceptance speech.