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First to all of you picky prom-dress pedants, red was close enough for me, but yeah you're right, fuchsia was correct, or the "tertiary red purple" sector on the colour wheel to be ... ahem ... precise. 🥸😎😊

I am but a lowly, male person after all, so please forgive me my colour theory trespasses. 😉

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I also thought I would post to all in response to a comment by Prof Pipe Tobacco because it does require a little bit of explication.

He wondered if the prom was for grade 13 grads or for anyone. It is for grads, but read on.

We used to have a grade 13 in Ontario but in no other province. In theory, grade 13 was considered to be roughly equivalent to first year university.

It was most certainly a tough year when I graduated in 1966 for every grade 13 subject required an exam set by the department of education in Toronto — one exam for all students across the province, no matter your teacher or location. This single, end-of-year exam was worth 66% of our final grade if I recall correctly. A year or two previously, the exam had been all of the final grade — 100% of it. Yikes! By the way: not only would your teacher not set the exam, but the person who graded it would be someone doing a 9 to 5, summer job, sitting at a desk in Toronto: presumably a teacher, but not your teacher.

By the time that Shauna was in grade 13, the departmental exams were kaput, and each teacher set their own. I think that was 1991 for her but had already been the case for many years. Our younger daughter, Allyson, six years later, did not officially go through grade 13, but in a sense she really did. They just called those same courses OAC credits: Ontario Academic Credits.

I taught a World Issues course in geography in about my final 10 years of teaching until I retired in 2001. However, by the time I retired, OAC/grade 13 was being phased out. If I had taught for a few more years, the World Issues course would have then been taught in grade 12 or, perhaps, not at all. I will have to ask the kids if it still exists, but I somehow doubt it.

It is worth noting that after this extra year was eliminated in Ontario high schools, Ontario universities also added an extra year to get a general Bachelors degree. Since then it required four years as opposed to three to qualify for a BA or BSc. Up until then, grade 13 had been considered to be the equivalent of a university year.

I took an honours BA, and that had always been a four year degree path, or at least the equivalent 40 credits. I actually completed my course credits in three years: not because I was clever but because my university followed a trimester system back then. I kept going through the summers and finished my BA requirements in three years concluding in 1969. I then took an extra year in a College of Education attached to a different university. I think education streams are now done concurrently with other course work and not as an additional year.

That's another thing to ask Danica after asking about World Issues. Oh, and I do want to know if any Ontario universities use the trimester system? I am not talking about taking summer credits but doing an official third and full-fledged semester in summer.