On a sultry afternoon in Washington’s Chinatown, dozens of teenage girls tried on silk and satin evening dresses, chose glittery bling and handbags to match and walked out without paying.
And it was all perfectly legal.
The girls were at a prom dress giveaway, one of a growing number of events where haves help the have-nots live part of the American dream despite the tough times that have hit the US.
Photo: AFP
The prom “is a really important time for Americans and we want to make girls from all different backgrounds feel beautiful on that day without going broke,” said Robin Fisher, one of the organizers of the Prom Dress Project, from the Polished Image style consultancy.
“All this stuff was donated, every single thing,” she said, waving her hand like a magic wand at racks of evening dresses, tables laden with glittery necklaces and earrings, and silk clutch handbags.
Even the space for the one-night event was donated, and dozens of girls waited in the stuffy corridor of the long, narrow Chinatown Coffee Company cafe to try on dresses in the ladies’ room.
Tiffany Cofield held a full-length burgundy dress with diamante studs around the empire waist up against her slender body. A pair of drop earrings caught the late afternoon sun that shone through the cafe’s bay window.
Tiffany went to her school prom last year, too, but her mother had to pay for everything.
“Dress, shoes, jewelry, hair — one night, US$600,” Jacqueline Cofield said. “The people who did this are a blessing.”
All the girls in the cafe-turned-changing-room were African American and attend high schools in poor neighborhoods like the southeastern Anacostia District of Washington.
More than a third of residents of southeast Washington live in poverty, and in 2009, the average annual household income in the districts — called wards — in southeast Washington was US$47,000, less than half the average in the city as a whole, according to the Urban Institute.
In one southeast ward, the number of people who have such limited resources and incomes that they are eligible for federal aid to buy food has risen by more than 11,000 in a decade to reach 35,423 last year, the Urban Institute says.
That’s more than half the ward’s population.
For them, splashing out on a prom dress is out of the question.
“The prom is very expensive and very taxing on a family, especially single moms. And there are a lot of single moms in this area,” said Stefanie Manns, who will be holding a prom dress giveaway in Prince George’s County this month.
“I’ve seen dresses for as much as US$600. One dress that you’ll wear one night, US$600,” she said. “With the economy the way it is, a lot of families just can’t afford the prom.”
However, many will find the means to send their daughter to the prom in the dress of her dreams.
“If we didn’t have this event to come to — which I’m glad is saving me US$600 — I’d still find a way to let her go to the prom,” said Carla Campbell as she waited in line with daughter Martinea to pick out a dress, preferably pink. “She’s a good student and I know how important the prom is. It’s a coming-of-age for Americans.”
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.