I don’t think you can do that. They invite you for that year and you are supposed to be a certain age and do it with the girls that were in the same class as you. I had a family friend escort me. It was fine. My dad came to the event but he had had back surgery and couldn’t do the walking up stairs to the stage then down the stairs and bow blah blah blah because it was so soon after the surgery.
And yes clearly I regret my choice of date.
lobster you looked gorgeous and your picture links are always hilarious!
…and no, I’m from a nice Quaker family. We don’t do that sort of thing./prim disapproval off
Like NinetyWt, I was trying to come up with "Cotilliion, " too.
I attended a Catholic school through 6th grade then went to public school. There was a lot of stuff I was out of sync with, but I was smart, so I figured out how to catch up. I took geometry in summer school so I could get into the advanced math sequence of courses.
But then I started hearing my classmates talking about Cotillion, and I realized I had some deficiency that no amount of summer school or anything else could overcome. I was all like, “Debbie Raines is in Cotillion?!? I’m smarter AND cuter than she is!” To top it off, I had a major crush on a guy who was a DeMolay, and I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t be his date for the Rainbow Girl dance.
Such angst! 
It’s been 30+ years since then, but that culture is alive and well in the place I’ve moved to. (It may be alive and well in the place I came from, for all I know.)
I am a Past Grand Patriotism for Florida Rainbow. Rainbow is an excellent way to learn how to be a young lady.
So is this just a southern U.S. thing, or a rich white people thing, or both?
I do not doubt that in the least.
My point is that I, when I was in high school, there were clubs or groups I couldn’t choose to join. I had to be chosen.
Okay, here’s my sister before the ball. I wish I could have gotten a better one but they were pretty much fused to the photo album pages. I had to work to pry this one off without destroying it. No gloves in this pic, but she still looks cute.
It’s a rich, white, Colorado thing, too – at least in Denver and Colorado Springs. Colorado Springs also has a black cotillion, though the traditionally white ball organized by the Junior League had a black deb for the first time a few years ago.
A total hijack - if you’re using those old “magnetic” photo albums, GET YOUR PHOTOS OUT OF THEM. They will ruin your family memories. There’s nothing “magnetic” about them, they’re just glue pages, and they’ll kill your pictures in the long run. Rescue them and put them in archival photo pages.
I once played in the string ensemble for a cotillion ball. I think all of the participants were black and it was in a posh section of town. That was in St. Louis, so not the South, either. So in my very limited experience, it’s not just white or Southern.
Speaking of horse sperm, here in the Horse Capital of the World, the Rich do deb balls. I had no idea. The newspaper quit printing society stuff a decade ago, and then revived it. So much to my amazement, one day last fall I was treated to a number of photos of debs and their daddies in the Sunday paper. It was amusing how much the people they interviewed highlighted the charity aspect of it all – as though the whole thing was done out of selflessness and concern for the poor. My favorite line was something like, “these young ladies are now ready to take their places as leaders in the philanthropic community.”
The lengths some people will go to to convince themselves that they’re better than other people – and that other people actually agree with them. :rolleyes:
It is my understanding that most of the black debutante shindigs are done by black sororities and fraternities (often at the historically black colleges and universities).
I had no idea that people still did this! I’m amazed that I’ve reached adulthood with absolutely no knowledge of this aspect of society.
No one did them where I grew up, at least as far as I know.
/edit: “Where I grew up” is south central Pennsylvania.
You sure? Check the Sunday papers in “the season”, you might be surprised. Certainly in my hometown if you weren’t aware of that part of society it would totally pass you by.
A lot of papers have policies against carrying things like this. But my guess is that most parts of the country that aren’t too rural have some sort of deb balls in some form that people just don’t know about…it may be the local country club hosting it. Most parts of the country don’t do it to the level its done in places like Charleston. It isn’t that different than a Bat Mitzvah or a Quinceneara - except that its a party hosted for a bunch of girls reaching a certain age rather than just one.
Let me tell ya’ I had no idea either, well outside of Hollywood movies, and the occasional rock lyrics. I assumed this was something in which only the very wealthy participated. I have never heard of a single person in Canada, or Scotland (where my roots are) attend such a function.
I think part of it also has to do with getting the girl married. From the books I’ve read, if a girl wasn’t engaged by the end of the season, then it was a lost cause for her in getting the “right” husband.
My college roommate (and the other two girls from her hometown at my college) did this the summer after their freshman year. I was all “SAY WHICH NOW?” because I had no idea this still went on. My roommate totally rolled her eyes at it all, but her mom was into it.
Incidentally, this roommate also had a silver pattern chosen for her, by her aunts, on the occasion of her birth. Every year for birthdays and such she’d get another place setting or whatever. Seriously. The point being that upon her marriage, she would have a full set of silver. It was just her Southern family’s thing, and she was born (like me) at the ass end of the 60s.
Really, she was the most down-to-earth decent person you’d ever care to meet. And making her debut had nothing to do with who or when she married.
Oh, the silver thing used to be very common - they’d get a baby spoon in the pattern and a “spoon pin”, which is, suprise, a little spoon as a pin, in the pattern. My mother is a Yankee so I don’t have one (although I was born into a silver pattern, as my mom has a metric ass ton of Chantilly including pickle forks and such) but I know lots of people who do.
Thank you for the tip, but I think it’s alreday too late for most of the photos. The old family pics I put on the flickr site are the only ones I managed to rescue, and not without a lot of trouble. The others were indeed firmly stuck to the gluey album pages.
My parents aren’t really into expensive photographic or tech stuff, so we have almost all of our old snaps stored like that, unfortunately. The others are loose and either stuck in the albums between tha pages or in shoeboxes. Same with the family Bible. It’s in the basement wrapped in Saran. :eek:
I keep telling myself I’ll do something about that but I never seem to get around to it.