Table Prama...

Shhh... pretend that this actually posted on the date it says it posted. 'Kay?  Thanks!

Do you remember middle school/junior high school? Yes, I am old; we had junior high school instead of middle school. We also had sixth-grade centers because evidently sixth-graders are academically and socially on a whole 'nother level from the rest of the age spectrum.

But I digress... and use cliche not-so-masterfully also...

I hated lunch in junior high. It wasn't the food. Actually, I rarely ate the food. My dad owned his own business, and we were coming out of a recession, so in a brilliant plan to acquire more Izod [by] Lacoste shirts, I took the dollar my dad gave me for lunch each day, bought a  ten-cent ice cream sandwich and a ten-cent milk for lunch, and I saved the rest. The Monday dollar went for food. Tuesday-Friday dollars went into the clothing fund. I made $4.00 each week not eating what I was supposed to eat for lunch, mostly in eighth and ninth grades.

But the junior high cafeteria was brutal. It wasn't until I took sociology at UNC that I realized why it was so brutal. The junior high cafeteria is a microcosm of social stratification. It's the social version of the food chain, with the popular girls at the top. I was shy, I didn't have the coolest clothes, and instead of being a brilliant athlete, I was a mediocre arts student.  Junior high was a little rough, largely because of the cafeteria.

The popular table, which had six seats actually, hosted twelve girls who sat tightly packed around their designer lunch boxes, talking about their latest clothing purchases or boy quests. At my table we spent most of lunch figuring out how we could make a move closer to the popular table.


Fast forward... a lotta years... and in the prama season, it's time to select a set of eight people to sit at a table together for the prom. Immediately the tables are labeled: popular girls and dates; jocks and dates; theatre people; band kids with dates; band kids without dates; student leaders; rebels; and....*shudder* (yes, I did actually hear someone call it this out loud) losers.


Our school officially has a Junior/Senior banquet. Dancing's not included, as there is way too much disagreement amongst us Christian-types about what sorts of dancing and music are acceptable in a social setting, if any at all. I get it. I'm fine with it. It is not an issue with our family one way or another. But the banquet is the big thing at our school. I could even capitalize it and say it's the Banquet.

For weeks there were closed-door negotiations about who was sitting with whom for the Banquet. It was big stuff. After more than a month of  positioning and planning, the sign-up sheets went up. And there was PRAMA. People literally raced to the bulletin board. They marked out names and added other names. It looked like a mini ink battle had broken out on the wall.

There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth as names went under invisible labels in groups of eight.

When the ink well finally ran dry, after a few days of the sign-up sheets hanging for the whole world to see, the signs came down. The coordinator had to call students to the office to decipher the cryptic markings on the sheets. I'm not sure anyone escaped table prama unscathed. There was a lot of fallen-worldness.

My solution for this problem was simple: assigned seats. We could use something highly creative like alphabetical order. Or we could get sophisticated, using a special algorithm that determines the best mixture of students based on transcript, extracurricular activities, and number of boxes of World's Finest chocolate sold.

But God had a bigger plan. The lesson in all this table prama for the kids who had ears to hear was that love covers a multitude of ink. In the end, students realigned their hearts and their tables. It was [almost] all good.