By: Daily Campus Staff
College formals are supposed to be unforgettable evenings of elegance, but it turns out they are often unforgettable for all the wrong reasons.
SMU Live reporters sought out students with stories to share about their most memorable formals. In many cases they spend more time off the dance floor than on it. Dates were late, dates were drunk, dates were even missing-in-action. But not every story had a bad ending.
To hear the good, the bad and the ugly listen to what these students had to share.
A recent engineering graduate (Publisher’s note (March 2, 2016): The graduate’s name has been removed at reporter’s request.), was locked in a party bus bathroom during a crazy formal night as an undergraduate. After thumping on the door for a while, she called her date. Her date and his friends had to strike the door to get her out — all before formal even started.
At the venue, the student wiped out on the dance floor, which gave way to a monstrous bruise the next day.
“Don’t drink too much early on in the night because formal is like a marathon,” the student said.
Senior art and creative advertising double major Courtney Curtsinger has crystalline memories of her sophomore formal. While standing at the bar, her friend, who had far too much to drink, dropped on the ground.
When she bent down to check on him, she realized that he was unconscious and bleeding from his head. The EMS and ambulance came, and formal ended on that note.
Her sorority is no longer allowed to hold formal at that venue, and her friend had to pay fines and a hefty hospital bill.
“Be careful who you pick as your date because you’re liable for them,” Curtsinger said.
Sam Doctor, a sophomore marketing and film major, had an experience straight out of the Twilight Zone. Her friend set her up with a formal date she did not know. She tried to be friendly, but despite her best efforts, the atmosphere grew increasingly awkward. At dinner, her date did not know how to pay the tip, nor would he engage her in conversation.
“He just stared, like this,” said Doctor, making an expression somewhere between confused and frightened.
After dinner, the couple and their friends went to fill the car with gas. At the gas station, her date jumped out of the car, grabbed the squeegee and attempted to clean the entire car with it.
“I will never forget that dinner ever,” Doctor said.
A Junior SAE took on New Orleans for an annual formal weekend.
He went to the venue then no one really knows what happened from there.
“I woke up in some random person’s backyard in a pool on an inflatable swan!” he said.
Jennie Sullivan, a sophomore pre-med major, was enjoying a formal with her friends at an event center in Downtown Dallas when a friend asked where her date went. Little did she know, her date had been removed from the bar for drinking too much and picking fights.
“I didn’t even notice he got kicked out 30 minutes earlier,” Sullivan said.
She tried to talk the bouncer into letting her date back in, but had no luck. Then she attempted sneaking him in. Nope, that didn’t work. They both went home.
Sophomore Madeleine Auffenberg recalls her worst formal experience to SMU-LIVE reporters.
It was Saturday night and Auffenberg had spent the whole day running around Dallas getting her makeup done, bronzing her skin, and perfecting her hair with her curling iron, all for the splashy formal at the Thanksgiving Tower.
Auffenberg, her date, and friends all headed to dinner to scarf down some food and drinks before heading downtown. During the dinner, Auffenberg looked over at her date and noticed his flushed out skin tone and sweaty pores. Before she knew it, her date was running for the door and puking in the bushes.
“It was pretty awkward because I didn’t know him that well,” she said. “He drank gin, which he was allergic to.”
Auffenberg’s date spent his night throwing up in his room while she went to formal dateless.
Advertising major Katie Smith thought she had gotten this whole formal business down to a science – the date, the dress, the dinner. It’s her departure that she still needs to work on.
At a formal last semester, Smith realized that her date was nowhere to be found at the end of the night.
She gets on the bus to go back to campus when the person behind her throws up all over the back of her head.
Running off the bus, Smith gets an Uber and about half a mile from her house, the driver gets into a wreck.
“I just got out of the car and walked home,” Smith said.
Tori Titmas is a senior studying film at SMU. Her freshmen year, she and her date took an unexpected pit stop before the formal.
On the way to the buses, the two decided to swing by Fondren to see who was spending their Friday night studying.
“We ended up playing hide-and-go-see in the library, then we were late for our bus,” she said.
Luckily, they were able to get a ride on a later bus and made it for the last 45 minutes of the dance.
In the spring of 1978, senior Bruce Flory took one of the most beautiful sorority girls to the SMU Beta Theta Pi fraternity formal. The couple was walking through the parking lot to the downtown venue when his date tripped on the train of her dress.
“She fell over and knocked her two front teeth out,” Flory said in a phone interview from his home in Detroit, Mich. “I ended up spending the night of my senior formal in the E.R. with my date.”
One of Flory’s closest friends and fraternity brothers, and another senior in ’78, Grant Smith, had a less dramatic formal experience. When Smith and his girlfriend arrived at the venue, they decided to play a friendly prank on their peers.
“We went to the bathroom and switched outfits,” Smith, from Greenville, S.C., said. “She put on my suit, and I changed into her dress.”
Jack Cahill, a first-year and member of the SAE fraternity, went to his formal just last week. He remembers how his roommate found himself the butt of a good joke the next morning.
At the downtown Dallas venue, his roommate thought he was taking a few funny photos in a goofy hat.
Instead, Cahill said that a company taking pictures at the venue ended up taking a video of his roommate instead. His friend woke up the next morning to an embarrassing altered version of the video by the company, “paired with that song, Turn Down for What, in slow motion,” Cahill said.
Theater major Jon Garrard had a very different experience during his sophomore
year formal. Garrard attended the KIO formal with a girl he did not know very well. As they got to know each other they made a deal to read each other’s favorite books. Garrard read “The Catcher in the Rye” and his date read “Spring Storm” by Tennessee Williams
“That started off a really good friendship,” said Garrard.
