Something I'd Missed

So terribly unfair it seemed to me then, that I should miss out on my high school proms; I’d helped to decorate for the senior prom; the theme was “Shangri La.”

I was painfully in love from a distance and way too shy to let it be known. What I would have given to go to the prom with Bobby Gowan!

So unfair; some girls got to attend proms even when they were freshmen. And here I was a senior and I was going to miss this special senior prom – my own senior prom for which I’d helped to decorate. I tried pretending that it really didn’t matter, but it did.

When the song “To Dream The Impossible Dream” came out and was in the play “Man From La Mancha,” I was so deeply moved by it that several years later I would read the book Don Quixote by Cervantes. There must be something in this story that would touch me, I thought. The song touched me deeply.

To love pure and chaste from afar. These words touched me deeply. I loved every boy I’d loved in that way – “from afar.”

To try when your arms are too weary to reach the unreachable star. This is my quest, to follow that star no matter how hopeless, no matter how far. To dream the impossible dream, to reach the unreachable star.

It was so beautiful, so painful, so magnificent. Later, I saw the play – a musical here in New York City. I got goose bumps when the song was sung on stage, and yet in the story, that this dreamer, Don Quixote, should be in love with a prostitute seemed to me incongruent and even repulsive until the actor sang the song “Dulcinea,” and it was the way in which he perceived this woman as perfect and beautiful just the way she was, without her having to change at all; his perception made her beautiful. And I longed for someone to perceive me beautiful, and I cried.

DeAnn Louise Daigle AWW by phone 1/29/08