‘Twas on this evening twenty-five years ago that I held a Christmas Graduation Ball at my parents’ home to celebrate my early graduation from Brandeis University. (Wanting out as soon as possible, I had taken a few summer courses that enabled me to finish off my college career in December of 1996 rather than May of 1997.) I was looking ahead to several months of freedom while my contemporaries drudged through their last semester, and planned to travel the world in The Royal Rainbow World Tour, which actually happened, even if the tour itself was largely delusional.
The evening was magical, even if the lead-up was worrisome. On the 22nd, I’d come down with a flu-like sickness that landed me in my childhood bed through the next day, and for the first time in a long period of throwing parties it was a serious possibility that I’d miss out on this most important one. I was too sick to move until about three hours before the party was scheduled to begin, and then, as if by magic and sheer force of will, I got up, felt fine, took a shower, donned a tuxedo, and headed downstairs to greet the guests.
It was a glorious party, filled with my favorite people decked out in festive and fine fashion, though the freedom from so many years of schooling and education would take a few more months for me to feel. Years of habit didn’t die out so easily, and the unease of every fall still rocks me though it’s been twenty five years to accustom myself to not having it be so. Back then, at the start of young adulthood, finally done with my finite stint in college, I let loose and enjoyed the moment. I couldn’t see what was ahead – I couldn’t even envision what I wanted to see – and all the not-knowing may have saved me. In certain extreme situations, ignorance can be bliss.
Christmas is a strange time to begin a new stage of life, coming too conveniently near the end of the year and the start time of so many other resolutions, most of which come to no fruition. The giddiness which I felt at that Christmas Graduation Ball, bound up in a checkered bow tie and matching cummerbund, with a calla lily in my pocket, proved an auspicious springboard for my launch into the world of adulthood. It was a launch based on sparkle and whimsy, a life planned through dreamy delusions, and a graduation from the protected worries of school to the unprotected worries of adult living.
