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THE DOUBLE

Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority's workshop, "Prom Night Frenzy," might change the meaning of prom night for its participants, the African American girls of Ann Arbor's high schools.

Prom is a night for display. Everyone looks so different in evening dresses and tuxedos that no one can help staring. Standing up to the probing gaze of your entire high school class demands serious preparation. Prom night was the first and last time I wore make-up during my high school years. So much preparation went into appearance for prom night, especially for girls, that it took on the weight of being the best we could possibly look, and our stares at each other became even more persistent.

If you believe the fashion magazines about such comparisons between women's appearances, only one body type measures up. It is, of course, thinner than most of the girls at my prom. It is also generally white. The few black women who make the fashion magazines are generally extremely light skinned and just as slender as their white counterparts. As Patrice Petway, one of the organizers of "Prom Night Frenzy," says, it is not a standard of beauty to which the African American community subscribes.

The Queen of Sheba, a monarch who visits King Solomon in the Bible, will represent an alternative standard of beauty in the workshop. A legendary beauty claimed by Ethiopian tradition, the Queen of Sheba took up space. Pictures of her depict her as far too large to make the pages of Seventeen's prom issue.

The fact that the Queen of Sheba is an icon of beauty with the staying power of centuries suggests the absurdity of a single standard of beauty. Under a single standard of beauty, either the Queen of Sheba or Uma Thurman would be intrinsically un-beautiful. If either of them were so obviously un-beautiful, everyone would notice. And yet both of them enjoy a reputation for beauty.

A single standard of beauty implies a dream that everyone look alike. "Beauty," clearly, lies on the happy end of the spectrum, the end where we all want to be, and where, presumably, we want the people and things we look at to be. Women don't necessarily want the bulk of the women we look at to be beautiful, but that is only because we fear that we are not. If the single standard of beauty offers any kind of actual societal happiness -- a broken-backed, thwarted happiness is the best we could do -- it would be with everyone measuring up to it.

Paradoxically, there is no such thing as measuring up to the single standard of beauty represented by fashion magazines. It does not exist outside of their pages. Even the models who model for the photographs cannot sustain the appearance fashion photography gives them. Fashion photography is all artifice: airbrushing, special lighting, pinning clothes from behind and countless other techniques that do not work in life. In life, even models have pores.

On a purely aesthetic level, imagining the whole world measuring up to the fashion magazines' standard of beauty suggests that this standard really has little to do with beauty itself. If everyone looked the same, the world would be much uglier in its uniformity. If walking the streets of Ann Arbor were like walking the pages of a fashion magazine, it would be boring, and there's almost nothing less aesthetically pleasing than boredom.

If Ann Arbor were populated by the stuff of fashion magazines, there would be no one old enough to have the education to qualify to teach. Minorities would be missing too. Neither the women who are delivering the "Prom Night Frenzy" workshop nor the high school girls who are participating would exist because none of them are white. The only way for them to strive toward the ideal standard of beauty is to try to diminish their own existence by such measures as losing weight and de-emphasizing those characteristics that make them look less white.

"Prom Night Frenzy" is going the other way. Sigma Gamma Rho's make-up tips will be geared toward enhancing features, not covering them up. They will emphasize the fact that beauty comes from within, not in imitating a two-dimensional image from a magazine. They will argue the value in taking up space, physically and mentally. Through the force of their own examples, as living, breathing, positive role models, they will turn the frenzy before prom night into a celebration of individuality and self-respect.