Romance by the Falls

With the arrival of prom season, I recall that in the spring of 1980, my parents pressured me to find a date for my senior prom. And I did. She was a lovely, warm person who had no idea what she was getting herself into.

The dance itself is a blur. I don't remember the theme, but it might as well have been "Girls! Girls! Girls!" My private boys' school classmates were in their element, thrilled, for once, to engage with the opposite sex up close. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was the slow-dance song of that era. Hearing its opening chords still makes me panic.

After the formal part of the evening concluded, the pressure mounted on me to go somewhere with my date and, well, you know, make out. Smooch. Neck. In some sense, to become romantic and achieve adolescent intimacy.

Avoidant, I remember driving around a lot with my date in my red Chevy Blazer. Our first stop was the parking lot of a country club located catty-corner from University School. 

The scene of the crime

I muttered something about how the car didn't feel right, so we drove around a bit more and eventually found ourselves in Chagrin Falls. 

This charming, quintessentially American village features an old-timey popcorn shop and—ominously—a boardwalk leading down to the waterfall's basin. Unlike the Stairway to Heaven, this one led directly to my personal hell.

My date and I found ourselves at the foot of the Falls. The jig was certainly up at this point. It was time to act like a red-blooded male. The prom and its antecedent events—the dinner, the tux rental, parental prodding—had built up to this moment.

In an out-of-body experience, feeling like I was watching myself in a movie, I stiffly and awkwardly embraced her. It was a bear hug.

I will spare you the rest of the details, not because a gentleman never tells, but because there weren’t any. After that awkward embrace, I escaped the Falls faster than the proverbial bat out of hell.

Years later, in an odd twist of fate, I worked at the Cleveland Botanical Garden with my former prom date; her office was adjacent to mine.

Joe even met her at a fundraising event. She wanted to know if she had “turned me gay”; hopefully, she was joking and realized I had already been batting for the other team all those years ago.

In another strange twist of fate, Joe and I often have brunch at a Chagrin Falls restaurant that overlooks the site of those long-ago doings. There's nothing like a side order of PTSD to accompany my Eggs Benedict.

--

Don't go anonymous: Please type your name after your comments. It's as simple as that.