By ELIZABETH GREEN, Staff Reporter of the Sun
Students at the city's elite private schools often say their lives are nothing like the glamorous, money-soaked portrayals of various television shows. That may be true some days of the week, but not always.
Tonight's joint private school prom will take place in the Waldorf's Starlight Roof.
Tonight, students at six of the most elite schools will attend a prom that will little resemble the festivities celebrated by most other American 17-year-olds.
A joint affair of the Collegiate, Browning, Brearley, Hewitt, Spence, and Nightingale-Bamford schools, tonight's prom begins at the Waldorf-Astoria's Park Avenue entrance, where students will arrive in limousines.
The students will then take an elevator to the Starlight Roof, a high-ceilinged ballroom accented in gold where, if they like, they can accept a drink from a butler carrying glasses of punch on a silver plate.
After dinner and dancing, they will re-enter their limousines and drive to after-parties. One will be held at a private Manhattan loft that some parents are renting for the night, a student attending said.
In the past, and after other recent private school proms, students have headed to houses in the Hamptons, where they bring overnight bags and celebrate in the privacy of the country, often guarded by hired security officers.
People at the Upper East Side school Dalton are planning such a party, complete with a legal waiver parents must sign promising not to sue the hosts should something happen to their children. The after-party is so popular that it has a waiting list, filled with the names of about half the members of the senior class, a source said.
The private, no-fee celebrations separate Manhattan private school students from their peers.
Prom industry experts say that public school students, particularly those in boroughs other than Manhattan, often pay $50 apiece to attend club parties shared with a half-dozen other schools that are organized by a company, PromTime.com. Some also head to the New Jersey shore, where they rent houses for a weekend. Others simply end their evenings with breakfast at a diner.
A limousine driver, Lloyd Gambol, who is steering a 24-passenger Escalade to the Waldorf's Starlight Roof tonight, recently took another set of students to the Skylight Diner on 34th Street.
Outside of the city, students at affluent public schools such as Scarsdale in Westchester and Roslyn on Long Island will hold club events of their own, charging $75 a person, the CEO of PromTime.com, Eddie Miller, said.
The owner of the Grand Prospect Hall in Brooklyn, Alice Halkias, said the differences between private and public school students begin to materialize at the prom.
All students arrive in limousines, and all of them walk on the red carpet the Grand Prospect rolls outside its door, but Ms. Halkias said that, once they enter, students at the Packer-Collegiate School, a prestigious private academy in Brooklyn Heights that had its prom over the weekend, carry themselves differently.
"They feel a little bit high-class, and they do something a little bit more," Ms. Halkias said. "They come in all dressed up, very elegantly, eat, and then they leave a little bit earlier than the usual to go to their after-prom site."
Clothing is another difference.
Rather than the "pimp"-style outfits (long suit jackets and canes) and floor-length gowns with matching tiaras that are de rigueur at many American high schools, Manhattan private school students stick simply to tuxedos and cocktail dresses.
The director of social catering at the Waldorf, Alan Shukovsky, declined to comment on tonight's prom, saying he needed to respect the privacy of each client. But he said that, in general, proms at the Waldorf — there will be eight this year — carry a different air, with students dressing like "the classic gentleman or lady."
"It's a prom at the Waldorf," Mr. Shukovsky said. "They dress the part."
Other elements, however, could be extracted from a John Hughes film.
Take, for instance, the Packer-Collegiate students, whom the Five Towns Limousine Service's founder and owner, John Erbis, said he escorted to a Bridgehampton after-party this weekend from Brooklyn via a giant luxury coach known as a party bus. (The seats are Italian leather and separated by an aisle large enough to double as a dance floor.)
When Mr. Erbis finally reached the house, the driveway was too steep and narrow for the party bus to climb. So everyone jumped off and prepared to hike the rest of the way on foot.
"All the boys carry the bags!" he said one girl ordered as they ventured off.
Mr. Erbis, mindful of prom's rite-of-passage element, said he corrected her. "I go, 'Listen, there are no boys back there. They're all men,'" he said.
The girl rephrased. "Oh yeah, all the men," she said.
Correction : Long Island is where the Roslyn school district is located. The location was misstated in an article on page 1 of yesterday's New York Sun.
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