Putting Forth Portola’s Last Forthcoming
Junior Mona Tavassoli fills in the Orion backdrop. Students from all four houses gathered on Oct. 12 to paint backdrops and rehearse dances for the halftime show. ASB’s efforts were more organized this year because of the increased participation and spirit of the student body.
October 24, 2019
ASB is preparing to have its last Forthcoming dance on Oct. 26 in the quad outside the 900 building. The themes for Forthcoming are based on movie genres: Pegasus with final fight, Hercules with fright night, Orion with alternate realities and Poseidon with romance.
“We ended up coming up with movie [themes] because the broadness of the themes would allow us to have a lot of creativity when it comes to creating events that students will actually participate in this year,” publicity commissioner and senior Ana Komarlu said.
Spirit week takes a similar approach, basing each of the dress-up days after movie tropes and recent trends. The themes for each of the dress up days from Monday to Friday were jock, goth, nerd, VSCO girl/e-boy/e-girl and house colors.
With this being the first school dance with a court, ASB came up with a way to revamp the traditional high school court system. The Forthcoming court will consist of three members, and one from the three will be crowned Forthcoming royalty.
“The court for this year is a pretty unique system. You nominate people from each class and each class gets to have a member of royalty for freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors,” Poseidon president and senior Matthew Vo said.
On top of having a member of royalty for each class, another unique thing about the forthcoming court is the gender neutrality.
“This is the first year that we’ve ever had a court because the previous years we weren’t able to create a court because of a lack of time and resources,” Komarlu said. “This year we were able to create a court system and we are also one of the only Orange County schools that chose to have an inclusive court where we don’t regard who’s crowned court royalty based on gender or sexuality.”
ASB’s decision to make a gender-neutral court is a step towards a future of schools that allows students to embrace themselves with the implemented inclusivity.
“Because we are a new school, we can do anything we want to make everyone on campus feel included and valued, so we decided to go with a gender-neutral court to encourage inclusivity on campus,” ASB co-adviser Emily Sheridan said.
