‘Wonderland’ will have you rooting for its students
This is how much you’re going to care about the high school students Michael Bamberger introduces in “Wonderland”: You’ll want to know what happens to them, and whatever it is, you’ll want it to be good.
Bamberger, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, spent a year chronicling the life of Pennsbury High School’s upperclassmen and their quest to have pop star John Mayer play their prom. (Mayer’s song “Your Body Is a Wonderland” had become sort of a theme for the senior class.)
Ambitious? Maybe — if the Pennsbury High prom was just another prom.
Pennsbury High is a typical middle-class high school in Pennsylvania. Jocks, it has them. Dorks, it has them, too. And hotties, including “Jeans, the hot girl in the hot car.”
But it also has a prom that, for 30 years, has not only been the biggest ticket in town but also has defined a way of life whose demise has apparently been greatly exaggerated.
The author says it best: “The book is about ritual, how these kids crave it, and how they yearn for a way of life most people assume to be dead. Just a few years after Monica and Bill and the invention of the phrase ‘hooking up,’ the kids in Wonderland — the kids at Pennsbury — are here to say they want courtship. They want Norman Rockwell. They want what their grandparents had.”
On prom night, thousands of parents and grandparents and otherwise invested observers line the sidewalks outside the school to watch the promgoers parade by in cement mixers, dog sleds, floats and a few traditional limos, too.
From the planning stages in September 2002 to the big night in May 2003, Bamberger tells a captivating story about a small-town prom and the people — teachers, parents, students — who make it happen.
We meet Stephanie and Bob, teenage parents who need a baby sitter for prom night, and all the luck they can get to resist becoming statistics; Alyssa Bergman, the resident hottie; jock Bobby Speer, who is everything and nothing people expect.
We also meet Bob Costa, an extraordinary junior who is already poised to take on the school and the world — but first he wants to get John Mayer to the prom.
In chronicling their quest to make this prom the best one yet, Bamberger gets us to care about the teachers and the students, the ones who make it and the ones who don’t. We root for them and their dreams. We also remember what life was like when, as Bamberger puts it, “You’re old enough to see a real glimpse of your adult self, but young enough to dream.”
As we now know, just a few weeks ago, thanks to Costa’s unwavering lobbying and Bamberger’s book, Mayer gave a surprise concert at the school’s 2004 prom.
“Go be amazing, people, and I’ll see you again,” a local paper quoted Mayer as telling the students.
It was nice that Costa and the rest of his peers got their concert — but they didn’t need Mayer to tell them to go be amazing. Bamberger has shown us they already are.