A Time to Bloom | The Apple Blossom Cotillion in Springfield, Vermont

It’s a soft night in early May.

Outside Riverside Middle School in Springfield, Vermont, clouds are blotting the full moon’s light; the air smells pungent, a mix of river water and new grass; the football field is still tender, spongy underfoot.

Inside, the daughters and sons of Springfield are almost ready: In the girls’ locker room 20 young women are adjusting their straps, slicking on lip gloss, and tucking loose tendrils of hair; in the boys’ locker room, their escorts are hitching up socks, smoothing their jackets, and balancing the wings of their ties.

For the past 16 weeks, since the first Sunday of the new year, when snows were already topping two feet, these high-school seniors have been practicing kicks and bows, promenades and waltzes, and learning to cross a gymnasium floor (some while wearing heels) with grace and panache. Through winter squalls and gradual thaws, through midterm exams and college acceptances, amid part-time jobs and community service, these 20 couples have been practicing for tonight’s début production, their only performance of Springfield’s 60-year-old rite of spring: the Apple Blossom Cotillion.

Just before Christmas, Larry Kraft, Springfield Medical Care Systems’ director of development (or, as he’s more widely known, “the Apple Blossom Guy”), received a blizzard of applications, each one attesting to long-held dreams: “Since I was little, I have always wanted to be part of the Apple Blossom Cotillion … ” “My mom tells me of when she participated in Apple Blossom in 1984 …”

One applicant, Alexis Roldan, described how the Cotillion was a seasonal tradition, like making pies for Thanksgiving and setting up a Christmas tree. Attending each performance alongside her grandmother, she wrote, “we would pile into that stuffy gymnasium and sit anxiously on cold bleachers. As soon as I heard Larry Kraft’s bold voice echo through the crowd, I knew the fun was about to begin.” She remembered, when she was 14, watching her older sister sway and twirl around the gym floor and thinking, “That looks awesome. Someday that’s going to be me.”

Tonight’s event is a debutante cotillion, a show, a pageant, and a fund-raiser, and as emcee Larry Kraft reminds the audience, the only event of its kind in the region. Moreover, as all the young female participants know, it’s also a coveted rite of passage, the chance to be publicly recognized, to be formally introduced to their community as young adults.

Sixty years ago, a woman named Harriet Lindley first planted the idea of staging a grand fundraiser for Springfield’s hospital. Back then, this closely knit riverside town was still a prosperous community, thanks to waterpower, which had helped it become a manufacturing stronghold, producing tools and gears in the 1800s, followed by rotary pumps, sewing machines, and lathes in the 1900s. Yet by the mid-1980s, the machine-tool industry began laying off workers, eventually shuttering most of its factories. Now “For Lease” signs adorn the long, boxy industrial buildings along Route 11, Springfield’s main thoroughfare, paralleling the riffling waters of the Black River. Yet, despite Springfield’s chilly economy, every spring, year after year, the young people of the town continue to bloom in the Cotillion.

In 1957, when the Apple Blossom Cotillion began, Alexis Roldan’s grand-mother Peggy spent the first Saturday in May in this gymnasium. Peggy was a 19-year-old high-school graduate, and thus ineligible to be a contestant. Nevertheless, after the ladies of the Cotillion had been formally introduced and the very first queen had been crowned, Peggy and her beau, along with the rest of the audience, swooped down onto the floor to dance the foxtrot and tango to hits by Frank Sinatra and Benny Goodman. Peggy wore a dress she’d sewn herself. “Back then everyone wore dresses and danced,” she recalls.

In more-recent decades, the casually clad audience stays put throughout the performance while the contestants and their escorts emerge before them in formal attire. This year, their matching floor-length gowns with glittery belts and spaghetti straps aren’t innocently white, or pale pink; they’re not reminiscent of apple blossoms at all, but more like the neon-pink petals of a crabapple tree. Alexis, who wasn’t crazy about her dress at first, confesses, “Well, I warmed up to it.” She took it home for Peggy to shorten, saying, “Grammie, we just got to take this in.” More than half a century after putting the finishing touches on her own dress, Peggy knelt with pins in her mouth and began tucking them, one by one, into the flamingo-hued silk of her granddaughter’s gown.

Back in February, a month into Cotillion practices, Alexis started working at Springfield Hospital three days a week, as a nursing assistant in the emergency department. And al-though a friend in beauty school helped style her hair, Alexis didn’t get her nails done, because she has to keep them short and bare for work. She painted her toes, though. She did her own makeup, and then one of the directors touched it up so that she “didn’t look like a ghost.” During the final rehearsal Alexis slipped, so now, moments before Larry Kraft stands at the podium and announces the first number, she applies a few quick squirts of hairspray to the soles of her sandals.

Thinking about the other couples dancing beside her, she admits she’s nervous, that there’s no way she could come out on top, that it’ll be “anybody but me.” However, there’s another part of her that doesn’t want to appear conceited or cocky but thinks there’s a chance she might be tonight’s queen.

Up in the filled bleachers, beneath the pennants announcing multiple boys’ and girls’ sports championships, the audience is knee to knee, elbow to elbow: cousins, parents, siblings, neighbors, and grandparents, as well as the five judges. Earlier this morning, the judges interviewed each of the contestants, asking who she is and where she’s going. Three of the judges are former Apple Blossom queens themselves. When I ask Miss 1988 about the influence that being crowned has had on her life, she makes a funny face at first, as if to dismiss the idea that it has had any bearing on her family or her career. But then she musters, “Well, it teaches you to get out of your comfort zone.”

Promenading from the out-of-bounds zone to center court, Alexis and her escort, along with the other couples, perform a small curtsy before the audience. The event’s choreographers have staged an elaborate, fast-paced program. For the next hour and a half, the dancers perform a dozen numbers, involving multiple costume changes and props. The floor occasionally swells as 40 future cotillionaires, the kindergarten and elementary-school boys and girls who’ve been practicing the routines alongside the elegant teenagers, join in.

As the couples whisk around the gym floor, the room is transformed. Any hint of game-day hustle and sneaker squeak has been replaced by the thumping music and the synchronized movements of the dancers’ dips and sweeps. Looking imperial in his black tuxedo, Larry Kraft alternately stands at his podium and sits in his director’s chair, observing the ladies and gentlemen parading around the floor, twirling parasols for one number, waltzing for another, boogieing and strutting in yet a third. I sense that I’m where something wonderful is happening, where young people are creating their own grandeur. These teenagers are proud and excited to be the celebrities of their community.

A fanfare blares, signaling the moment when the new queen is announced, and Miss Apple Blossom 1988 steps to the podium to express what an impressive crop of sharp, well-rounded young women these Springfield parents have produced. Gathered beside her are Miss 1987 and Miss 2002, as well as last year’s queen and her court of runners-up, who brandish bouquets to present to this year’s winner: none other than Peggy’s youngest grandchild, the young woman in a gown hemmed by her Gram—Alexis Roldan.

After last year’s queen bestows Alexis with her crown and flowers, the new queen poses with Larry Kraft for the first official photo. Having just concluded his 15th Cotillion, he’s the enduring aspect of this ephemeral bunch: the orchardist perhaps, amid Springfield’s ongoing inflorescence. And yet the gym is also filled with other stalwart guys, such as the girls’ escorts—those reliable gentlemen who accompanied their young ladies through so many rehearsals with no interview to look forward to, nor a shot at a fancy title and its attendant hubbub. Their function, it seems, is to provide the handsome branch, the support against which each hopeful contestant flourishes.

Now the whole audience spills down onto the gym floor, and it becomes a happy chaos of people with bouquets in the crooks of their arms, full of picture taking and proud hugs—friends, family, and classmates; former factory workers, hospital staffers, and people who work at the correctional facility; teachers and farmers; past queens and plenty of future cotillionaires—and all of the jubilant humming is like the frenzy of bees among the apple trees in full flower.

Larry Kraft strides purposefully toward the curtained exit to the locker rooms. He stashes the microphone on its home shelf and slips out the back. I, too, make my way out, drifting through the girls’ locker room, which smells so sweet and where empty hangers are strewn and vibrantly hued costumes puddle on the floor beside baubles, lip gloss, water bottles, and shiny sandals—just the way that after a big wind blows, the apple petals fall and pile up in small drifts beneath the trees.