Who Are the Prom Kings and Queens?

Let’s begin with a drive—America flashing past my window; a continuous blur of relational objects and symbols; gas stations, flags, fast food chains, historic plazas, statues, luxury, poverty, stark natural beauty, maybe a storm chaser if you’re unlucky (or lucky).

I’m not sure exactly what provokes this, but sometimes I like to wonder who the prom king and queen are of these tiny towns that pass by—the kind of town dotted with churches, McDonalds, and a smattering of homes; the place that feels impossible in contrast to my life in the city. It’s a question that illuminates the fascination our culture has with viewing our city-selves as projected through the desires of fabricated small-town stories. And yet, as the stereotype of a prom king and queen feels worn out and flat, the reflexive move of perceiving the imperfect self through the imperfect other has never resonated more than in today’s culture for me.

Recently I browsed the selection at Alias Books in Atwater Village and found Lawrence Wright’s acclaimed “God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State.” His nuanced presentation of Texas as a collision of random luck, bad luck, and desires upends and supports the stereotypes of the mythologized state that he so clearly loves. As a figure in the text, Wright is a conundrum—his identity slips between political binaries, religion, aesthetics, and powerful figures and this lends the work an intriguing open-ended quality; the mirror to Wright is obscure even as it is all encompassing—this is part of why he is such a powerful journalist.

Wright demonstrates the heart of his argument in a paragraph about a chain store, “At Buc-ee’s, an aspiring Texan can get fully outfitted not only with the clothing but also with the cultural and philosophical stances that embody the Texas stereotypes—cowboy individualism, a kind of wary friendliness, superpatriotism combined with defiance of all government authority, a hair-trigger sense of grievance, nostalgia for an ersatz past that is largely an artifact of Hollywood—a lowbrow society, in other words, that finds its fullest expression in a truck stop on the interstate” (Wright 5).

Indirectly this is what I gleam from him: open curiosity provides an opportunity to witness the world beyond our own reflections; vitality blossoms when we can celebrate the mysterious three-dimensionality of this culture that we collectively clamor into realness through words, material goods, homesickness, and of course—the yearning to suffer less. Wondering about the prom kings and queens of the countryside, and all that that statement implies, paints more of a portrait of the anxieties of a city-dweller than of the towns themselves; what are we missing out on in the city? How can we suffer less? How can we fill that bottomless question with the imperfect other?

A younger version of myself lived in a harsh “them” versus “us” binary. Compulsively, I applied this scorching judgmental mindset to art, music, fashion, and to other people. I believed that we were the good ones, that we were the Martin Sheens staring over the Oval Office desk. But who was the “we” I blindly fought for? While it certainly fostered a shutdown defensive mental space, I now compassionately understand this attitude as a component of the process we undergo whilst determining who we are by pointing out who we are not. I lived in this righteous paradigm—the one that had me committed to a rigid culture war that could form blinders the size of skyscrapers.

So much of the “other” those days—politically and culturally—was determined by aesthetics—the long-haired Pearl Jam vegan fan versus the pink yacht club polo shirt who loves a steak, the co-op tote bag versus the Oakley wrap arounds, beatnik poetry versus Disney princess stories—all of the comparisons felt stifling especially as a mixed race kid amongst a predominantly white liberal community—I didn’t clearly belong in one visual camp.

I was raised by hardcore dems and I wore camouflage short shorts and sang R&B at school functions and this gave the buttoned-up morally outraged anti-botox Birkenstock wearing White feminists (of any orientation) a rise (let me have some fun, and I love my Birkenstocks). They couldn’t believe I dressed like a Spice Girl as a fourth grader. There was something shadowy about their discomfort and focus on me. My mother always told me to ignore it, to be me, to dress how I wanted too because obsessing over the clothing of a young girl and how she danced was their problem not ours. And also, she would ominously warn me of how the culture of hippies could be intensely patriarchal and racist despite proclamations of an inclusive love. Needless to say, as a kid I was presented with a murky and uncomfortable situation.

Today, so many of our aesthetical preferences are bound together by the trends of the internet making it difficult to determine who is who and what is what. I prefer this ambiguity. I do not deign to assume the morality of a duck-hunter-print-wearing musician covering Shania Twain at a dive bar, because if there’s any lesson that has come with age, it is that I know very little about other people beyond the parts of their social masks that trigger a response within me; I see what I fear in myself.

I desire the spark of animacy that comes when we drop out of the exhausted clashing of symbols; I want to belong everywhere and nowhere.

This is definitely not a case for bypassing moral injustices—hard lines must be drawn when the culture is aiding genocide, fascism, systemic oppression, the list goes on. I just want to acknowledge that the neoliberal mindset of “we” I grew up defending is anything but perfect, in fact it has been a huge part of the problem (an obvious statement in 2025), and also, I want to understand cultural and physical landscapes as deeply complicated puzzles. My focus is on chasing a sense of aliveness rather than remaining shut down and tired.

My mother’s passion around health and her distrust of the FDA with their allowance of ingredients like hydrogenated oils and enriched wheat (a cause I am so thankful that she stood behind) brought the likes of Dr. Oz onto our television screen (Dr. Weil was the gateway). At the time, he was not the clearly marked Trump supporter scam artist that he is today, but still, the memory of his smarmy smile in my kitchen as he showed us how to access a pressure point on the inside of our arms reminds me of hanging out with my mother and being happy—how strange.

Once the power of an intrinsic belief system is noticed, the fear becomes insubstantial; I don’t think that anywhere is safe, and so, everywhere is safe; contradictory and also relieving, mystical and horrifying—abundant and reckless.

Slowly, I have been working my way through Juan Villoro’s “Horizontal Vertigo: a City Called Mexico”—Villoro like Lawrence, draws me into the labyrinthine of a place where happenstance and mutual desires to reduce personal suffering become the slippery foundation of a place; static symbolism makes way for movement. Villoro writes of Mexico City, “Syncretism has been our most helpful formula for creating a city. This is true in terms of both building and remembering it. The different generations of a single family turn the city into a palimpsest of memories, where grandmothers reveal hidden mysteries to their granddaughters” (Villoro 4).

Both writers unexpectedly offer me a sense of calm because of their ability to witness a flowing definition of truth that sprouts from many sources in one space all at once. What infuses their work with an abundance of magic is their passionate inquisitiveness which at times is able to work in tension with the inevitable grafting of their personal meaning onto the subjects at hand; they embrace the chaos rather than try to sort it out for the reader so we experience the world as the riddle it is. The writers themselves are of course, part of the landscape and fully embodied in the text although hard to clearly point out at times.

This avenue into place as a process of tangled dreams, dumb luck, and collective interests brings me more hope for the future than the loose promise of an idealistic vision (sorry President Bartlet).

We invoke a vigorous spirit within when we give ourselves the permission to perceive people and places that are foreign to us as imperfect mirrors that show us what we are not comfortable to see about our own selves, and in that, we are connected if by nothing else. What Wright and Villoro accomplish for me is a spiritual practice of jumping headfirst into the culture and accepting the overwhelmingly jagged edges that fit, by chance, in this strange, strange, world.

Let’s end with a drive: we’re chasing a tornado down the highway, Jimmy Buffet with Alan Jackson is turned all the way up, we’re rejoicing at the footage of the ghastly storm and what it might bring us online, but then, the twister takes an unexpected turn, and what we thought was fun becomes the desire to live and those two factors become one and the same.