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The Time of My Life
Edited by Rob Spillman
Flying Dolphin/Broadway, 219 pages, $13
Limousines, orchids, bad tuxedos and skimpy (but long) pastel dresses abound. Movies like “Pretty in Pink” and “Mean Girls” inform fluffy consciousness of prom night, but the essays in “The Time of My Life” about the rite of passage, by writers like Steve Almond, Pam Houston and Anne Elizabeth Moore, evoke the real torment and anxiety of promgoers — and shunners. “While the prom wasn’t always a multibillion-dollar industry,” Rob Spillman writes in his introduction, “it is safe to say that the psychiatry field has gotten fat on the psychic fallout of prom night.”
