"A White Sportcoat and a Pink Carnation,” by Marty Robbins, is ancient history to teenagers today. Times have changed. Now it’s acceptable for girls to go to their proms alone, and in some places – though not on-Island so far – for guys to go in drag.  
    
But just as they did in the classic hit by Robbins, girls still say “no” to that once-in-a-lifetime night in May. The reason, though, may be more financial than romantic:  when prom gowns easily cost over $300, some sixteen-year-olds – unless they or their mothers are sewing wizards – simply don’t have the money.
    
Annette Sandrock, assistant librarian at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, discovered a way to make sure every high school girl gets the opportunity to go prom-trotting this year. She has developed a program to recycle last year’s prom gowns. “I saw the kids getting ready,” Sandrock says, “and realized some of them weren’t going. I put two and two together.” She ticks off the expenses involved in what can turn out to be a very pricey highlight of the high school years. There’s the $50 average cost of two tickets, tuxedo rental for the boys, the corsage, transportation, plus the prom gown. “That doesn’t even count dinner,” she says. Sandrock and her husband, Vineyard Haven police officer Brian Kinal, brainstormed, and Kinal, a former journalist whom Sandrock calls “the family word man,” came up with a name for the new program: Hand-Me-Gowns.
    
Sandrock, who calls herself Jim Carrey’s soul mate, remembers her own prom-trotting days with bittersweet humor. Growing up in Brockton, she had parents with a strict clothes policy: four outfits for school. That meant, horror of horrors, she had to wear one of them twice in a week. At the tender age of fourteen, Sandrock was relegated to wallflower status when no boy invited her to the ninth-grade prom. “I really wanted to go in the worst way,” she remembers. “That was the only thing holding me back.” It probably didn’t help that her dad was a teacher and coach. (For the record, she is an attractive honey blonde.)
    
No shrinking violet, Sandrock started calling up her male classmates to invite them. “Twenty guys turned me down – pretty much every boy in the class,” she says. “It wasn’t accepted then even to call a boy. I guess I was ahead of my time.” While she may not have made it to the dance, she never let it slow her down. She married and moved to West Bridgewater on the Cape, with a second house in Vineyard Haven. After the West Bridgewater home burned to the ground, she left her life there behind and moved permanently to the Vineyard with her three children.
    
Once Sandrock hatched the idea for prom-gown recycling, she ran it past the high school’s principal, Peg Regan, and other high school administrators. “It’s wonderful for a service like this to be in the high school,” Regan says. “It’s kind of what we used to do as kids with friends.”
    
“We’ll find a space to store them,” Kevin Carr, the vocational director and building supervisor, told Sandrock. “Everyone thought it was a great idea,” she says.  The cooperation of librarian Sandra Mott was invaluable, and Jill Grant, a teacher, offered to help. Sandrock put out a flyer after last year’s junior prom, asking girls to donate their used gowns to the program so that others could wear them next season. Letters appeared in Vineyard newspapers, and gowns began arriving. “I’m just amazed at the support from the community,” Sandrock says.
    
“At first when a new gown came in, I’d hang it on the door behind my desk in the library,” Sandrock says. The gowns became their own advertisement. Now one rack is full and a second is filling up.
    
“I saw signs everywhere,” says Sarah Paulson, a senior at the high school. “There’s a lot of people who wear their older sisters’ gowns. It’s pretty much the same thing.” Paulson wanted always to have the memory of shopping for her gown with her mother. But Amanda McIntosh, another senior, says she definitely would have checked out Hand-Me- Gowns if the option had been available last year. And she thinks many seniors will choose it this year.
    
“I love clothes,” Sandrock says, “so this really fits in. Clothes are a fun way to express yourself, and people always say, ‘Do what you love, the happiness will follow.’” She hopes to enlist Island seamstresses to make themselves available for suggestions and alterations. Her plan is to designate a Saturday before prom night when students will be able to come in to try on dresses. She also hopes to get help with dry-cleaning, possibly through a discount coupon, since that cost can also be considerable.
    
Thanks to Sandrock, lack of a frock won’t dampen Vineyard prom queen spirits.