Concord High seniors Anna Quirk and Ally Leuci already bought their prom dresses. They rented a party bus.
They were ready for Concord’s June 11 prom long before the coronavirus made those plans irrelevant.
“We haven’t really heard anything, but we pretty much think prom is going to be canceled,” Quirk said. “It’s definitely sad that my classmates and I won’t get to experience our senior prom, but I also know that this is what has to be done to keep people safe and there’s not really anything we can do about it at this point.”
Other traditional year-end events like graduations and National Honor Society inductions also need substitute plans, but they don’t pose the same challenges as prom, which is meant to be socially intimate, not distant.
“Prom is a tougher one to pull off than graduation,” Concord Superintendent Frank Bass said. “That’s a really tough one to figure out, but never say never and we’ll keep everything in play, so to speak, and see what we can do, but I don’t want to hold out a lot of hope for that one.”
That’s especially tough news at Concord High, where only seniors can buy prom tickets. Seniors can invite underclassmen as dates, but for Class of 2020 seniors who haven’t been to prom before, like Leuci, this was the year and the prom they were counting on.
“It just makes me sad,” Leuci said. “I’ve never been to prom and I was just looking forward to it. I’m hoping they postpone it, but I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Even seniors from other local schools who are missing their own proms have sympathy for their Concord High counterparts.
“I’ve been really looking forward to prom, so I’m not too thrilled about it being canceled,” Hopkinton High senior Katie Meserve said. “But I was thinking about it and I feel even worse for the Concord seniors because I know they don’t get to have a prom until their seniors, so I’m glad I was able to go as a junior and at least have one experience like that.”
At Pembroke Academy, the prom is for both juniors and seniors and the junior class officers plan the event. They had booked The Executive Court Banquet Facility in Manchester for May 16, but now they’re hoping to get their deposit back and considering other options.
“We’ve been doing a lot of talking lately about possible alternatives for prom,” Pembroke junior class president Mason Cummings said. “It’s a little bit stressful because we just want to make things as good as possible for the seniors. This is their last hurrah.”
Students aren’t the only ones impacted by the loss of prom. Dress and tuxedo shops, photographers, limousine rental companies and other prom-related businesses are all feeling the hit.
“I bought the same number of prom dresses I would normally buy for prom season and we’ve sold less than half of what we would normally sell,” said Helen Dionne, owner of A Day to Remember bridal shop in Concord. “I haven’t even recovered my cost yet. I still have prom dress inventory that I have to pay for.”
Dionne will hold on to the dresses until next year because her suppliers won’t take them back. As difficult as things are now, she’s confident the dresses will still be in style, and back in demand, next year.
“The majority of the dress companies are sitting on inventory, too, so chances are they will carry those styles forward to next year because they want to sell that inventory just like I do,” Dionne said. “So hopefully they do carry those styles forward and maybe add a couple of color selections or something like that just to update it.”
While Dionne may be able to recoup some of her losses next season, photographers like Alan MacRae don’t have an inventory they can push to next year. For them, this season’s business opportunities are gone.
“For me it really started when the winter high school tournaments were canceled, because I also do a lot of sports photography,” said MacRae, who lives in Belmont and has been a professional photographer for 21 years. “And now with proms and graduations being called off it’s been a pretty solid hit for me, to be honest with you.”
MacRae hasn’t had to look far to see others impacted by the uncertainty of prom season.
“My neighbor across the street is probably one of the best seamstresses that I know and during prom season there’s usually a steady flow of cars going in and out of her house with girls and guys getting dresses and tuxes altered and fitted,” MacRae said. “But there’s been a noticeable absence of traffic there this spring.”
Dionne had one full-time employee at A Day to Remember before the coronavirus, but she had to lay off that person soon after the shutdown of non-essential businesses in March. She’s applied for government aid for small businesses, but she hasn’t heard if she’ll be getting any and is unsure if it would truly help. She does have a rainy-day fund and believes that can get her through this crisis.
“I feel confident that we will survive this, but I think there will be a lot of small businesses that won’t,” Dionne said.
In the meantime, students and administrators will brainstorm ways to salvage this prom season. Cummings said they were talking about having it outside under a large tent toward the end of summer, a solution that has also been considered at other local schools, like John Stark Regional High in Weare. Cummings said that he and the other junior class officers at have talked about the possibility of a socially distanced prom, but they weren’t crazy about the idea.
“As it stands right now, we’re thinking it’s going to be all or nothing for us,” Cummings said. “If we’re out of the shutdown and fully free to gather, then we’ll have something. If we’re not, and we still have the stay at home order, then having a prom is not really a risk we want to take.”
If the Concord High prom does get canceled, as many expect, Quirk and her friends might make their own plans for the dresses they’ve already bought (and can’t return) and the bus they’ve already rented.
“We’ve talked about it, and maybe if this all slows down a little bit we can get together in smaller groups and take pictures,” Quirk said. “We’ve already changed the date on our party bus to later in August, so we’re hoping we can all go on it together and maybe we’ll even wear our dresses then, but with how it’s looking now I don’t know if we’ll even be able to do that.”
(Tim O’Sullivan can be reached at tosullivan@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @timosullivan20)