Nothing sells a lie like a conspiracy

I've been noticing a lot of prom stuff online what with all the pandemic stuff limiting events. Proms and pandemics are antithetical.

Or so I'm told. I never went to prom. I was social distancing before it was cool.

I can't blame the cigar smoke. Prom was well before my first stogie. I had to rely entirely on my personality to repel people back then.

My junior year, I didn't even try. I couldn't imagine that any girl would want to go with me. I started asking them my senior year, and turns out, they couldn't imagine it, either.

A pandemic would have been good for me then. Bad overall but good for me in that I'd have something to blame other than myself.

Maybe there was a pandemic. We're all getting old enough that remembering what happened and what actually happened are not necessarily the same thing. Plus, we're living in an age where truth isn't all that important.

Little lies. Big lies. Creative lies. That's where the money is these days. The more outlandish the lie, the easier it is to sell.

You might think that contradicting a lie with actual facts would kill it, but you'd be wrong. That just reinforces the lie.

It might require a new lie, but that's OK. Lies are cheap enough to produce. There's a big mark-up on the manufacturing of lies.

I've never been too good at lying. But I'm taking lessons.

My first assignment is about prom. We were talking about prom.

I said I didn't go to prom. Well, not my own school's prom. I went to prom at a different school. In fact (I love saying "in fact" when I'm about to lie), I went to prom at three different schools.

Yep, three different girls from three different schools invited me to their proms. And I went. And I would have been prom king if I'd been eligible. I was the best dancer. The best date. The best joke teller.

What else? Never having been to prom, I'm running out of things to lie about.

Oh yeah, I was the best dressed, too. White tuxedo with a red cummerbund.

I can verify all that. My prom appearances were videographed, and now, more than 35 years later, they're still the most-viewed videos on YouTube.

If you can't find them, it's because Google and Yahoo have conspired against me to suppress the searches.

That's one of the greatest tactics when it comes to lie defense-the truth is there; you just can't get to it because powerful, biased tech giants don't want you to see it. Nothing sells a lie like a conspiracy.

Well, I feel bad for these kids who didn't get to have a real prom. They'll have to figure out another way to canoodle with their would-be dates.

On the bright side, they can tell their grandkids whatever they want. Nobody can dispute them. And for those who couldn't get a date if they plucked one off a tree can always blame the pandemic and claim whatever virtuosity their virtual prom robbed them of.

Life's grand when you can make it up.

© Copyright 2020 by David Porter who can be reached at [email protected]. Did I say three proms? It was six. No, 12. Twelve dates in 10 counties over three weekends. That's my story.