The above photos were from Robyn's junior (1990) and senior (1991) proms, held at Hominy High School and Ponca City Senior High School respectively. They are sponsored by Aquanet and Stiff Stuff hairspray.

Today was "prom day" on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. She shared her own bad prom photo and invited her viewers to do the same. Other than the poofy sleeves and being largely responsible for the depletion of our ozone layer, I'm not sure that my prom photos would qualify as "bad" per se. However, the stories that go along with them...

About a week and a half before my junior prom, I got a call from my boyfriend's mom. We lived three small Oklahoma towns apart and only saw each other on the weekends. However, one week night he decided he wanted to see me right then. Trouble was, he didn't have a car and his parents wouldn't loan them their car on a school night. So he did what any responsible teen would do and snuck out of the house. Unbeknownst to me, he then he stole a car, hotwired it, and proceeded to make the drive over to my house. He was pulled over for speeding in the next town and then arrested. The phone call from his mother informed me that she would not be paying his bail, and he would also be grounded for my prom.

After having a panic-attack over my custom-made dress going unworn and unseen, I started making phone calls of my own. Turned out a friend from my old hometown was having his prom the same week as my own — only his was on a Friday night and mine was on a Saturday night. He rented his tux one extra night and saved me from having a nervous breakdown!

The weekend after prom, my mom drove me over to my Jailhouse Rocker's house where I returned his letter jacket and class ring. He was pretty much grounded for life after his arrest. Since I never heard from him again, I don't know if he ever did make bail or not.

My senior year story is almost as interesting. We had moved back to my hometown just before the start of the school year. My then-boyfriend's dad got transferred right after the holidays and he moved 3½ hours south of me. We pledged to be "hopelessly devoted to you" and stayed together. We'd planned on doing the double-prom thing that year. Soon after I bought my dress, I called him one evening to discuss his tux. He picked up the phone and after those obligatory "I love you's" and "I miss you's" that lovestruck teenagers do, we started random chit-chat about how my day had been...blah blah blah... When I told him I'd just got off work, he acted all confused and said, "I didn't know you had a job." When I replied, "Well you've only visited the record store about a hundred times...," I was met with silence. And then, "Ohhhh - ROBYN!" Can you say "busted" boys and girls? Sure, I knew you could. I hung up, took the phone off the hook, and third-class postaged his class ring back to him the next day.

A friend who had graduated the year before came to the rescue and offered to be my date. Prom Crisis II averted. However, a couple of weeks before prom he ended up getting his driver's license suspended, and I ended up driving us to my prom in my mom's car. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to fit a full petticoat under the steering wheel of a compact car, but that was quite fun let me tell you!

The laughs didn't end there, however. Our pre-prom "grand march" promenade for the town folk was moved indoors due to inclement weather that year. That ended up literally being the understatement of the decade. As we were pulling up to the Hutchins Memorial Auditorium tornado sirens started blaring. A few miles south of us, an F4 tornado (number 35 on this list) was touching down near Billings, OK. Here's a photo of that tornado from okweatherwatch.com. We didn't have time to look for parking. People were running everywhere and you could just tell it was bad. So we drove my mom's car up on the lawn and ran inside just in time to be herded like cattle into the basement. Eventually the all-clear was sounded, and we returned upstairs for the "grand march" — followed by the prom itself at the Marland Mansion. But just to keep us on our toes, the tornado sirens went off again about 3-4 times that night. It was so chaotic, we forgot to even have our portraits made!

Of course, there's also my freshman prom in 1988... But since anyone who knew me back then still affectionately refers to my boyfriend/date at the time as Satan, I've protected the guilty and replaced his face with Ronald Miller's (a.k.a. Patrick Dempsey).

It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times. Ahhhh...high school!