The Summer of '82

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I was 19 and fresh off my freshman year at college. The university was only two hours from my home, but I’d met people from different corners of the country, expanding my world view as I expanded my waistline, thanks to Thursday night kegs and the availability of Häagen-Dazs on the college meal plan. My classmates were articulate, outspoken and in a constant state of disbelief that Jesse Helms, my senator and the hero of many hometown neighbors, was for real. I’d survived chemistry and calculus (barely), but was coming home to elements and equations that were as tricky and befuddling as those in lab or in math class. In the summer of 1982, I was coming home to Come Out, to uphold the white-gloved tradition of my sister before me, and of generations of middle-to upper-class girls in my town and across the South. It was the summer of my debut.

The annual debutante season kept our newspaper’s society pages stocked with photos for most of the summer. There was coverage of all the pre-Ball teas, barbeques and cocktail parties hosted by different members of the Debutante Club of High Point, ladies who were always identified in the paper by Mrs. Husband’s Name and who were the gatekeepers of this elite rite of womanly passage. My mom made sure I wrote them post-event thank you notes.

And there was, of course, multiple-newspaper page coverage of the Ball itself, with panoramic group portraits of the debutantes - 12 of us flanking the front steps of a large columned mansion, a cascade of ivory gowns; another posse poised in semi-circle on the lawn, standing erect and perky, with gloved arms hanging awkwardly by our sides. Our full names and parental and grandparental pedigree made for bulky photo captions, but that was the point - to demonstrate the upstanding lineage that had landed us here, on the portico of high society, or what passed for it in a sleepy city of 50,000. I made the cut because my father’s clan took up half of a phonebook page. The Woods had deep High Point roots, never mind that my dad had yanked his up and moved on, leaving my sisters and me to make our debut escorted by his first cousin.