D.C. teen’s dress drive saves New Orleans proms

NEW ORLEANS – When Marisa West walked into the muggy high school cafeteria in New Orleans Thursday, 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 Washington, D.C.

West, an 18-year-old from Beltsville, Md., was honored Thursday at Cabrini High School, but she has become a heroine nationally after her simple gesture to help Hurricane Katrina victims turned into an outpouring of generosity: She wanted to collect prom dresses – maybe as many as a hundred, she hoped.

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.

Pig-tailed senior Katie Bourgeois told her classmates that she had bought her brown satin prom dress the week before Katrina hit but she hadn’t thought to take it with her when she evacuated. “It drowned in the flood,” she said.

West said she just wanted to give the students a reminder of what it was like to feel normal again.

West’s inspiration came, like so many genius 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.)

“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.

Ultimately, students from nine high schools in New Orleans and one in Bay St. Louis, Miss., were able to choose gowns.