A Florida prep school prom. A live tiger. What could go wrong?

[brooklynite]

Washington Post

The prom’s advertised theme was “Welcome to the Jungle,” and staff at Christopher Columbus High School went to some effort to fulfill this promise of the wild.

Not that the all-male Catholic prep school waived its standards of etiquette for the big night on Friday. The boys — about 400 were due to graduate this year — were told to arrive at the DoubleTree by Hilton Miami Airport & Convention Center in jackets and ties, clean-shaven, sober and unpierced. Their dates, too, showed up looking as proper as befits such a milestone.

The prom had been decorated like a real, wild safari camp — or at least some Hollywood approximation thereof, with faux-rock walls and fake snakes and trees along the main wall.

Other decorations were real. A live lemur and macaw were incorporated into the spectacle to serve as props for the students’ take-home photos. Boys and girls passed around a tiny African Fennec Fox like a corsage — though the fox hung rather limply in photos that have since been deleted from a school Instagram account.

Christopher Columbus’s student activity committee has also vanished pictures of prom night’s wildest surprise — a live tiger to entertain the students, for which the principal has since apologized.

[hlthe2b]

1. behavior befitting their schools' namesake, it seems...