Is crêpe paper or tissue paper better for making giant flowers?
This is just one of many questions Bearden’s prom committee has had to deliberate in order to make this year’s dance the best it can be.
Since deciding on this year’s prom theme of “Adventures in Wonderland,” the prom committee has turned its focus to the next daunting task: decorations.
“So once we pick a theme in the fall, we start really trying to nail down what it looks like,” prom sponsor Mrs. Anna Graham said. “What feel do we want it to have, what aesthetic do we want it to have, and then we start trying to visualize or even draw it out.
“A lot of times, I use sketches to see how I want things to look. So we go through that whole process, all the way down to what centerpiece we want on what table.”
This year’s prom is May 4 from 8 p.m. to midnight at The Mill & Mine.
The prom committee has to find the best way to bring their ideas to life, whether that means buying decorations or making them by hand. “Some proms are what I call labor intensive, and some proms are monetarily detrimental,” Mrs. Graham said. “So you can buy a lot of stuff, or you can make a lot of stuff.
“So this year, I knew that when we picked Alice, that it was going to be build-heavy with things that we were going to have to make.”
With making most of the decorations by hand, there has been an intense effort to try to beat the clock until prom day.
“Our biggest enemy is time, so dealing with those two weeks off for snow has been a pretty major hurdle for us because normally those would have been two weeks when we would have started work, so losing that time has been really hard on us,” prom committee member Hadley Spreng said. “The other big challenge has been trying to figure out how to make some things feel elegant and sophisticated for prom and not like an animated Disney movie that, while being a classic, is not really the vibe we’re going for.”
Added Mrs. Graham: “This is prom [No.] 22 for me. This one, I would say is unique in the fact that it is fairy-tale-esque, but it has all the different kinds of elements and design features that mimic scenes from the movie, something that people are familiar with, so how do we interpret that for a prom and what does that look like?”
The interpretation and decorations are crucial to help drive home the theme.
“Without the decorations, I feel like The Mill & Mine’s natural atmosphere would be the only one present, and that would make it really difficult to get the theme at all,” prom committee member Brenni Matson said.
Ensuring that the theme is present has been a major point of emphasis for prom committee.
“Prom is a very American thing and rite of passage event that is in teen movies and cartoons and television shows, and it’s a big thing,” Mrs. Graham said. “So picking the theme is basically the type of event that you’re going to put on, so I do not let the committee pick things that have been overdone. I challenge them to think outside the box.”
However, with an unconventional theme, it makes creating decorations even more difficult.
“It’s not just as simple as opening a book and finding instructions on how to build some of this stuff,” Mrs. Graham said. “We think about things like how it will look when it’s dark, how it will look up close, how will it look in photographs.
“And so we go through that whole process and then we decide how we’re going to make it or build it – and a lot of times, it’s trial and error.”
Added Spreng: “The decor is a huge part of every prom, but especially for a theme like this one that is so well known. Also, because Wonderland is so vast and complex, the decorations allow us to get at that idea and emulate Alice’s journey through all these different areas. It is really important to us that we fully capture the whimsical and the spectacle of Wonderland because it is a theme that everyone is going to recognize and have expectations for, and we want to do everything we can to meet and exceed those expectations.”