Unique, student-created decorations add depth to Bearden’s 2019 prom

Mrs. Victoria May thinks she has pinpointed the perfect way to both tease and partially describe what students can expect when they arrive at The Mill and Mine for Saturday’s prom.

“If you were to be a scuba diver, and you were swimming under the ocean, imagine what you would see, and that’s all I’m going to say. If you could go further, deeper down, what would you see?” she said.

This is how the art teacher describes the 2019 Bearden prom theme, officially titled, “Luminous Depths.”

Prom will run from 8 p.m. until midnight. Attendees should expect to be captivated by the decorations the prom committee has created.

“It’s not your basic ‘Under the Sea’ theme,” senior prom committee member Made Harrell said. “There will be some that you expect, but I feel like we also have some neat stuff that you would have to look really closely at to figure out what it actually is. It’s different.”

Taking a less traditional route, they’ve used assorted everyday items for their decorations, including plastic spoons, toothpicks, Q-tips, and snow cone cups. All of their decorations will come together to create the effect of the different layers of the ocean.

“There’s the daylight zone, twilight zone, and the midnight zone,” Harrell said. “We wanted to do that with the venue and have when you first walk in, it’s like the light stuff like the corals, the nice light blues. Then as you go down it gets darker, and that’s when you get to the dance floor.”

Prom committee – alongside sponsors Mrs. Anna Graham, Mrs. Shelby Graves, Mrs. Autumn Suranofsky, and Mrs. May – have been working hard on the theme and decorations since before Christmas break, even having a 6-hour work day. Their first step was deciding the theme, which included brainstorming and then narrowing down ideas.

“We always get ideas from the students on the committee,” Mrs. May said. “There’s a grouping of students who kind of present ideas for that theme, and then we vote. We might persuade them sometimes and say, ‘hey, you should pick that,’ but we don’t participate in voting.”

After they had picked a theme, they took off running with it.

“From there it just evolved, it was kind of a surprisingly quick process,” Harrell said. “We knew we wanted certain things, like certain jellyfish, and then Mrs. Graham, she was very important. She is the most creative woman I’ve ever met.

“She found out how to do all these different things and explained it to us.”

Mrs. Graham also played a huge role in coming up with the vision for the twist they wanted to take on the basic “Under the Sea” theme.

“Mrs. Graham had an idea of how it would look,” Mrs. May said. “She had seen these really cool windows at the store Anthropologie. They’re amazing, very artistic-looking display windows… so we really pulled a lot of ideas from their display windows and made them our own.”

Both the sponsors and students of prom committee are excited to share their work but are reluctant to reveal too many details, hoping to surprise attendees with something different from previous proms.

“We haven’t done a really bold theme in a while,” Harrell said. “There was a lot of work in decorations, more than normal, so the whole prom committee was on it.”

Added senior prom committee member Ghadeer Rashed: “This one was harder than previous years. This idea was more out-of-the-box. We had to make pretty much everything for it.”