2:26 a.m. There are very few things in life that are better in the imagination than in reality. Love and marriage and babies and the sun on your shoulders: all are better experienced than fantasized. It's more fun to eat a peach than to plan to.

But there's one thing in life that's best left to your daydreams, and that's a prom.

Trust me, I know.

For example, I was thinking, way back when Patrick and Saundra were planning the big extravaganza, that it would be so much fun to go. Spinning lights, spinning dancers, glitter and starch. Spinning wheel of time, take me back to when.

When I went to proms, there was no such thing as limos. Boys washed their cars the week before. In fact, while I was sewing the tiny rosebuds across the bodice of The Perfect Dress, he was scrubbing and waxing and cleaning the windows on the outside of his brother's Chevy Chablis, and the inside too. It was expected.

When I went to proms, I actually wore little white gloves. This still amuses me.

When he came to pick you up in the clean car, he brought a nosegay if he aspired to cool and a wrist corsage if he didn't, or couldn't. If he brought the kind you pinned on your dress -- well, that's too horrible to contemplate. It wasn't in the plans.

And it all must be in the plans, because the plans were the whole point of the thing. He wears a jacket to match your outfit. You wear heels low enough to make him look tall. Your hair can't be too high, but it should be higher than normal. High is festive. Posies add the needed bulk. (Hi Roe! How did you know?)

Sex of any kind is not going to happen, so you can stop wondering. That hand on the arm in the formal photo is pretty much all the physical contact that's going to be allowed. That's not what proms are about: Proms are about dresses! Shoes! Makeup! Not making out. Not tonight. Do you have any idea how long it takes to put lipstick on with that tiny little brush?

Hey -- here's something interesting. I still have the blush from that evening. I really do. It's in a pink plastic swivel thing, like antiperspirant, and they really gave you way too much of it. It's called Frosted Tawny Face Gleamer by Revlon. It was before powered blush and I still have plenty, because a little goes a long way. It didn't take much to make me blush back then.

Let's see -- the photo is from 1965, and so this little swivel tube of silky mystery gleamer is 35 years old. Cool. You never know when you might need a tawny face.

When are you too old to be thinking about proms?

When your makeup is older than most of the people in the room. When nobody asks you for a date. When you get roses for Mother's Day and not for your hair. When you can't remember the name of the boy in the picture.

All of which is true and wise and all of that, and I should heed the sound of the spinning wheels as they grind the days out. But I don't. I just turn the music up and dance in the dark, instead.

Because proms -- even, and especially Journal Proms -- are all in the mind.