Alaska News

Tuxes, high heels and corsages: Bethel prom a community affair

BETHEL -- The disc jockey was the outstanding senior boy in 1983 and his father helped build KYUK public radio station. Every couple promenaded down a lighted path lined with dozens of parents, siblings and other community members. Bethel Covenant Church put on a free dinner beforehand and a party afterwards.

Bethel Regional High School's 2015 prom took place Saturday with a nautical theme at Yupiit Piciryarait Cultural Center.

Boys ordered tuxes flown in from Anchorage or went to the big city for a suit. Girls shopped online, browsed Bethel's Arctic Belle Boutique or checked out what people were selling through Facebook. They wore matching boutonnieres and wrist corsages, but there were no limos, no spendy dinners downtown, no spa pampering beforehand. Some girls carried their high heels and wore sneakers through the dirt parking lot. The cost to get in was $40 a couple for those who planned in advance.

Soon after the prom began, family members poured in for the Grand March, in which the doors open briefly to the community at large.

Greg Porter -- the DJ and Bethel graduate who is now the Anchorage-based president of an alternative energy company with a side entertainment business -- said he does a lot of proms. Bethel is the only one with a promenade for the community. Usually parents just sneak in for photos, or to make sure their kid is OK. He brought in his own audio equipment -- about 1,400 pounds of it. Northern Air Cargo donated the freight cost.

He announced each of the 36 couples like they were movie stars.

Couples slow-walked to the "Rocky" theme, then more classics -- "Eye of the Tiger," "Staying Alive," "I Love Rock and Roll" -- posing for the adults with smartphones and flashing cameras.

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"Proms don't have to be those weird crazy things that everybody dreads," Porter said. "They can actually be pretty clean. They can be an awful lot of fun."

Porter got his entertainment start with a show at KYUK even before he started high school. His mother, Rosie Porter, was the publisher and editor behind The Tundra Drums newspaper back when it was a force. His father was an engineer who came to Bethel to build KYUK.

Saturday night, he kept the music clean and danceable. There's no need to bring in dirty stuff, he said.

"Life throws a lot of stuff at you that they don't know about yet," Porter said of the teens.

He remembers his own prom, with an outer space theme at the high school, before the cultural center was built. Everyone felt so nervous about how they looked yet everyone looked great, he said. He looked at the Bethel prom-goers this year, simultaneously self-conscious and unaware.

"They are all so beautiful."

Lisa Demer

Lisa Demer was a longtime reporter for the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Dispatch News. Among her many assignments, she spent three years based in Bethel as the newspaper's western Alaska correspondent. She left the ADN in 2018.

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