2,800 Prom Gowns From a Single Thread
New Orleans Students Salute Beltsville Teen Who Restored Their Hope
By Annie Gowen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 12, 2006; A01
NEW ORLEANS -- When Marisa West walked into the muggy high school cafeteria in New Orleans yesterday, 400 girls stood and cheered.
"You have single-handedly saved prom for countless girls," Christina Luwisch, senior class president, told the senior from Georgetown Day School in the District.
West, an 18-year-old from Beltsville, was honored yesterday at Cabrini High School, but she has become a heroine nationally after her simple gesture to help Hurricane Katrina victims -- she wanted to collect prom dresses, maybe as many as a hundred -- turned into an outpouring of generosity.
What she wound up with was 2,800 dresses -- enough to go to 10 ravaged high schools. And shoes. And handbags, jewelry and computers. And more.
The assembly to honor West, on the eve of the dance, turned into a collective outpouring of grief for loved ones lost, family members displaced, homes gone. As ceiling fans twirled, the Cabrini girls wiped away tears with the sleeves of their uniforms.
Pig-tailed senior Katie Bourgeois told her classmates that she had bought her brown satin prom dress the week before Katrina hit but that she hadn't thought to take it with her when she evacuated. "It drowned in the flood," she said.
"It's not the dresses," Cabrini Principal Yvonne Hrapmann reminded her enthusiastic, sweaty charges. It's about how "one thought, one gesture" could become a national cause.
West said she just wanted to give the students a reminder of what it was like to feel normal again.
"The drive has really given the girls hope," West said. "They'll be able to look back on prom as a point where they were just able to be 17- and 18-year-old girls and be able, in that moment, to forget about what's going wrong."
Tonight, she'll be going with the Cabrini students to share in their big evening.
West's inspiration came, like so many humble ideas before it, amid the crowded racks of the fashion discounter Loehmann's. West, the reigning Miss D.C. National Teenager, was taking a break from the stress of her winter finals to think ahead to the joys of spring and buying her own prom dress. (She later got into Harvard University.)
"I was looking through all the sequins and the beads and the glitter, and I realized that in New Orleans so many girls wouldn't feel that joy you feel at prom -- all because of the devastation of Katrina," West recalled. "I thought I could help restore at least one of their high school traditions that they wouldn't have otherwise."
But after her quest was featured in a Washington Post story, it was picked up by CNN, ABC, People magazine and Time. Donations started pouring in, eventually coming from every state but Hawaii. Ten days later, the Beltsville post office called, West said, a little peeved that there were so many boxes. We'll be right over, said West's mother, Leathia, 48, a psychotherapist and ceramics teacher.
Better bring a truck, the postmaster said.
Dresses came from sorority girls cleaning out their closets, from failed and successful pageant queens of yore, from people touched by the story. One man sent one of his late wife's evening dresses, as a tribute to her.
Jilted bridesmaids gave big. About 50 sent dresses, many still with tags. They'd include notes. "They'd say, 'I was supposed to be in this wedding, but it never happened,' " West said.
Ultimately, there were 2,800 dresses, sizes from 2 to 2x, the piles of sequined tulle and satin and lace covering almost every inch of available space in their brick Colonial in Beltsville. (There were even four Vera Wangs.)
West's personal favorite was sent by a donor from Virginia: a bright pink confection with a tulle skirt that she calls "the Cupcake Dress."
The donor, Melinda Ball, a real estate broker from Strasburg, said she was so moved by West's story that she went to her two daughters' closets to see if they would part with some of their old prom attire.
"And there was that Cinderella dress taking up closet space," she said.
At the Wests', three metal dress racks bent, then broke. Then came hundreds of shoes with matching bags and so much jewelry that they set up a jewelry "store" at Cabrini. Two artists, Jenna Connor and Krista Soderholm, who exhibit their work at the Alchemy boutique in Silver Spring, made 100 pairs of earrings by hand for the event.
U.S. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) sent two dresses and was so impressed with West that she offered her a summer internship in her D.C. office.
And it still grew: A Georgetown man named Patrick McGettigan, a retired entrepreneur who calls himself a "mini-philanthropist," gave $10,000 for SMART Boards, a newfangled teaching tool that's like a blackboard hooked up to a computer. A Rockville printing company, E.U. Services, outfitted a truck with racks and paid to transport the dresses. Make-up artists and hairdressers volunteered to help the day of the dance.
"Our girls learned an important lesson from Marisa, about the power of one," said Anne DiPaola, Cabrini's director of public relations and alumni.
McGettigan said he was moved by the sheer simplicity and intimacy of West's cause.
"It's one thing to donate to the Red Cross," he said. "But I thought this little impractical thing would draw a lot of attention, and it has. It became a little more personal, a little sweeter."
Ultimately, students from nine high schools in New Orleans and one in Bay St. Louis, Miss., were able to choose gowns.
They arrived first at Cabrini one overcast day in April.
The all-girls Catholic school sits in the part of New Orleans called Mid-City. The former convent and orphanage suffered damage from wind and rain during the hurricane in August but never flooded, though houses just three blocks away had four feet of water. The locals like to say Mother Cabrini, the first American citizen saint, protected the place where she once lived and prayed.
But Katrina took its toll. More than 35 percent of the 440 students lost everything, school officials estimate. Before they were able to reopen the school Nov. 8, they had satellite classrooms in Baton Rouge. They went to class on the night shift.
West ended up partnering with the school at first because it was the only one she found that was open and answering the phone.
The day the dresses arrived, "the girls just lit up," said Ardley Hanemann Jr., Cabrini's president. "Thirty-five percent of them lost everything, and even those that didn't lose everything didn't want to ask their parents to buy a prom dress."
Cabrini senior Ryan LeFrere was going to have her grandma sew her dress like she did last year, but the sewing machine was swept away, as was LeFrere's one-story house in East New Orleans, her computer and her beloved black Jetta. It had fish in it, the insurance people said.
Since the beginning of the semester, LeFrere has been separated from both of her divorced parents, bunking with two classmates in a friend's home that survived the storm. She misses her mom, an Internal Revenue Service employee living in Houston with LeFrere's younger sister. But she wanted to finish her senior year.
She also wanted to go to prom but didn't feel right asking her mother for the money for an outfit on top of her senior fees and everything else.
"I didn't know where I was going to get a dress from or where I'd get the money from," she said. When they heard about the dresses coming, "it was kind of a miracle."
She had hoped to get the Cupcake Dress, but there was fierce competition. The girls had been allowed to sign up for "shopping" appointments prioritized by need, but for the Cupcake, the name had to be chosen out of a hat. LeFrere ended up picking a sequined strapless floor-length gown in turquoise.
When she tried it on, she loved it right away.
"When I wear it," she said, "I feel lucky."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company