Senior Year in College

Figure make up for lost time and continue with these stories. Let’s see. Senior Year was a very busy one at school.  I directed four shows and choreographed a dance piece. I also wrote a 108-page thesis and discovered the Writing Center on campus, promptly wishing I’d taken advantage of it the rest of my four years there. Oh and I completed a minor in my spare time. So yeah, fully embracing my workaholic-ness at the time. I wisely gave up on living on-campus and was totally at SecondFamily’s house that year, to my BestFriendFromCollege’s chagrin. The man I was in lust with got engaged, which I found extremely inconvenient (although he didn’t actually marry her until several years later, so I guess it was nice — in a way– to have time to get used to the idea).

In some ways I think I entered adolescence late, and I remember being more “difficult” in this period of my life than I ever was in high school. One incident that stands out, was being in a show, which received mixed reviews on campus– and was required to write a paper for the professor/director about what a good play it was. The style of the director had been very oriented towards creating an ensemble of people that would feel passionately about the work and making autobiographical contributions to a larger social theme in the play, and on a level I did both– but I got hung up on certain aspects of the whole project I found unprofessional, and on a sense that my life was being exploited in a way. I felt a strong sensation that this professor was trying to understand me, and that the conclusions she was drawing were incorrect– but instead of revealing myself more fully it closed me off further to her. What I wrote in the paper was honest, but taken to be hurtful, and I do regret it. It served no great good to burn that bridge. Unfortunately the professor was also my thesis advisor and that whole incident created a distance that did no good for that project either. My grades weren’t really affected by any of this, but the whole year had an energy of discomfort that really was unnecessary. In a way, it was my first experience with politics, and the first strongly negative reaction I’d received to stating my opinion–and it took quite a long time to sort out where I had gone wrong and what had happened to what could have been a meaningful professor-student relationship.

BestFriendFromCollege and I had a graduation party together in a rented tent on campus, and I was so happy my SecondFamily and my Aunt, Uncle, Cousin, and Cousin’s Wife were able to come out. There was definitely a sense of relief, being done, and a sense of good adventures to come.

I spent much of the summer in Europe, first on a “business trip” with my family in Germany that then turned into visits to Brussels and Paris as well. Then I went on my own trip studying directing in Italy and marveled at the scenery every chance I got. It was all rather heavenly.

Back in the states I felt great trepidation, having worn out my welcome to some extent at SecondFamily’s house and needing to earn money to get an apartment of my own.

These memories for so long seemed to be not-that-long-ago and lately I’ve been realizing how distant college seems. I’ve been missing it, or parts of it, as I’ve wondered about my suddenly seeming uncertain future and even toyed with the idea of getting a sixth year degree or PhD down the road. There certainly is something insular, and attractive about the little world of a college campus, pursuing one’s own research and stretching the mind. My master’s experience was very different because I was even more detached from the college itself, commuting in for a class or two each semester. It’s now been two years since I’ve had to write anything for a class, and after SO MUCH school for so long it’s kind of striking to realize that. It’s also been about seven years (I think) since I’ve been in a play (other than a couple brief performances at church a couple years back), and about nine years since I’ve been in an acting class myself. Is that what I want? I guess a lot of my work these days feels like I’m GIVING a lot, and I don’t have much that is giving to me. Something to think about.

Sophomore Year in College - New York, frustrations, and drunken-ness

I haven’t written one of these memories in awhile, had to go back to remember where I was at. It may be sad when I actually finally reach my actual age– or maybe I’ll come up with memories I have of other people at different ages, that could be interesting. Blogging is such a strange mix of conversation, semi-public journal, and self-indulgence– luckily all the people who care to even read this are well-versed in putting up with me.

Sophomore year started with my semester in New York City, in some ways my “real” move-in-to-college moment I guess. I lived at a Y on the 9th floor (as I recall)– and just so I wouldn’t be homesick for my previous dorm experiences, someone was thoughtful enough to pull the fire alarm a couple times at 3 or 4 in the morning. As my normal “day” at the time was running about 8:30AM-1:30PM, the sleep distruption did not sit well with me, and even less did the forced marches down 9 flights of stairs to wait in a lobby with 100 other pyjama clad strangers. You can’t take an elevator when there’s supposedly a fire, you see. Of course once we would be given the go ahead to return to our mattresses, the mad rush at the elevator made it impossible to get back up to my room without waiting another hour in line– so I would turn around and have to crawl my way BACK up 9 flights. Talk about character building.

It was Urbanblight’s first fall in NY too, and it was nice having someone I knew to catch up with on the phone in the middle of the night and see a show or two with.

My classes were a mix of really interesting and disappointingly basic in my view, but I was thrilled to be back to immersion in theatre and dance, and had by then fully committed my brain to the notion that I was a director as much as an actor. There was this one guy in my group, G, who turned 25 that fall and was the second oldest, with me being the baby at 19. He was a dick. He came from some midwestern liberal arts school where he was the star of his theatre department and pretty much felt that every show we went to see or class we took was beneath him. We did a lot of dance work that usually made him uncomfortable and when we would have history classes or critiquing sessions regarding dance performance he made a point of saying he thought it was all a waste of space and his time. I tried really hard to like him and finally pretty much gave up one day when he point blank told me that he thought I shouldn’t be there at 19. I remember I got him a Christmas card. Cuz that’s the kind of person I am. Or the kind of person I was then anyway.  Outside of my discovery of instant messenger friends and the occasional Midnight call from Urbanblight, it was definitely a lonely time. I was coming into my own in some ways but, just as with my 9th grade year in 10th grade geometry– I never quite fit into the social realm of the group I was with, either in class or at my internship. We had a final paper due our last week and this dancer C who I always loved came by my room to use my computer a few times. As she typed we talked about our common distaste for G’s condescension and our experiences seeing more performances in three months than we’d seen in our whole lives. Its striking to me that it was two and a half whole months before I latched on to someone as a friend and not an acquaintance. And then suddenly we were in a taxi on our way back to the Y for the last time, my father was knocking on my room door at far too early an hour, and I was dragging my CPU through the elevator doors for a trip back home.

The transition back was difficult. Students who go back abroad for a semester or a year are often warned about reverse culture shock, and NY life is as much a different culture as anything I found. I had one professor I truly believed in, and I rather unfairly based all of my happiness on him. I was disappointed, first to be dropped (for administrative reasons) as his advisee, and then to find out (as stage managing for a director often does) that he had faults. Adolescence had finally kicked in and I was furious at the situation and at him.

I got drunk for the first time. I believe it was a cider and a half. Maybe two. I knew I was drunk sitting on the floor of my  friend R’s dorm room floor, when I started laughing and I couldn’t stop. In the back of my head I remembered the lecture a guest speaker had given to a certain social issues theatre group I’d belonged to in high school– his theory was that a kid drinks a beer or two in the woods with friends for the first time, and he has a mood change. He may have heard that alcohol does certain things, he may have wondered about it, but there is a moment when he first experiences it that is locked away in the memory for the rest of his life. And I remember thinking “this is the mood change.” And it’s true, that whenever I really seriously talk about wanting to get drunk (which has remained about as sad a feat as it was back then, I must say) what I’m really saying is that I want to get back to that sensation of tickling, almost floating in my head, when I have an awareness of everything around me but– softer, when I feel the pleasure of my amusement and don’t mind as I notice I can’t wrap my hands around myself to hold in or conceal what I’m thinking

Freshman Year in College

I remember there was an opportunity to watch PULP FICTION on the Quad during Orientation, and thinking that that must be weird, hearing that particular movie down the block. I was in a single room, which was quite a relief to me but did little to bring me into a college community I was pretty stubbornly opposed to bonding with. The whole how-did-I-get-here thing loomed large and I very much expected to transfer out sophomore year.

It was weird, being 7 blocks away from home but AT college. It was like I wasn’t allowed to celebrate my entrance into college or mourn the changes in my life– after all, I was just going to be down the street, right? And that sort of added to the insult of it all. The loner status I had carved out was cemented here, and I felt very much out of the loop socially.

I remember we played I NEVER that first month and my best-friend-to-be was the only one who had had sex. Everyone made a big deal about it, which was sort of odd to me since she’d been seriously dating her boyfriend for 2 years and was clearly engaged-to-be-engaged. One of the sweetest girls there also admitted to have smoked pot once in high school, and everyone was appalled because it wrecked their 4-minutes-old image of her– so I felt pretty badly for both of them. I just missed being the completely odd one out by admitting I had had a cavity before, so I wasn’t completely sheltered and there was at least one person who had done ONE less thing than I had.

Sometime before Halloween a man I liked kissed me on my neck and I liked it. I liked it so much I spent the next 36 hours thinking I was going to throw up.  I spent most of the rest of the year a little nervous that a fear of vomiting was destined to ruin any chances for my future sex life.

Freshman year was the year I really attached myself to directing. I had directed before, sort of as an after-thought or because it was something no one else had signed up for, but it was somewhere in this year that I found my director’s eye and began to enjoy that part of the process as much as performing. Someone asked me what my “concept” for a particular play was, and I asked what they meant– they replied, “What touches you about this play?” And that has sort of stayed with me in so much of the work I’ve done as an artist, exploring and cultivating what it is that touches me in a piece of theatre.

p.s. Urbanblight– remember when you babysat my friend’s fish– Sampson?– and they thought I’d killed it and replaced it with another one.  I totally forgot about that…

Senior Year

There were ways I fully came into my own. Having been relieved of any obligation to take any more math classes until college, I had enough credits to just take 3 classes and a study hall at Real School. I took a semester of Speech and a semester of Urban Literature with really great teachers. In speech I sat with a friend from Arts School and had a grand time basically hanging out and occasionally writing stuff. With probably 30 kids in the class, it was a breeze for me– give a speech once every couple weeks and spend the rest of the month listening to people. In Urban Literature we studied primary sources of the history of my sometimes sad city, and read books like Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas, a book that probably would have been banned in most of my friends’ more suburban school districts. I remember reading an amazing short story about a little boy earning his father’s praise by shooting an escaped slave. Then I went to Psychology, which was taught by my Biology teacher from the year before. This teacher was one of the great ones, and taking a class with her in a subject I was actually interested in was academic bliss. There are times when I feel compelled to defend my alma mater despite its very real issues– and she is a reason. I saw my college friend’s biology and psychology homework and marveled at how easy it was compared to the standards she held us to. There was chemistry though, because my school required 2 lab classes to graduate. Chemistry was a class my father pushed me to take when I thought physics sound much more interesting and useful. I maintain that I was right to this day. Chemistry class for me represented, now and then, everything that was wrong about education today. Once every week or two there would be a test. I would memorize terms the night before, take the test, and promptly shuttle the knowledge out of my brain. I worked the system, masterfully, earning an A- in the course. After years of taking “Honors” classes in almost every subject, I purposely downgraded to an “Academic” class. But I did not then, nor do I now, have any understanding of chemistry, period– in a class that was supposedly preparing me for college level science classes. Chemistry’s entire significance was that it allowed me to pass high school.

Art School, of course, was fabulous. My acting classes were wonderful, including my main one that had a great new teacher I am friends with to this day. My classmates and I were very close-knit and we enjoyed ourselves except for occasional worries about whether our presentations would be sufficiently impressive enough to the younger classes we imagined looked up to us. There were several performance events towards the end of the year that I felt proud of and I cannot begin to express how grateful I was for having been able to have had the chance to do them. I had convinced Urbanblight to forego his parochial school education (I don’t recall that took much convincing) and join me there. This made for great fun and lots of Burger King (weird now, since he’s a vegetarian), although there was a definite moment when he realized he knew a thing or two, and didn’t quite hold me up in quite the same way he used to. There were areas in which he always thought of me as wiser or more knowledgeable, and I distinctly remember feeling a little threatened when his confidence  changed.

It was a difficult year for me in terms of Sister. January 4, 1996 stands out to this day as the worst night of my life. I remember calling Urbanblight at 6:02AM the next morning to tell him how I watched her come down from what we think was pot laced with heroin, in my bedroom, thinking she was going to die and believing it would be my fault for not calling a hospital or telling my parents upstairs. He had to explain the early call to his parents by claiming my parents were so stupidly conservative we didn’t have a TV or radio to notify us as to whether Arts School was having a snow day. I told my parents she was sick and that I was tired from taking care of her and convinced them to let me stay home from school too.  I remember volunteering to shovel off and warm up my dad’s car, and putting a Blues Traveler tape in while I sobbed, the first moment I’d been able to, obsessing over the image of my 15 year old very little sister, clutching her dirty white teddy bear, confessing, “I’m not strong.” I repeated a verse that I had desperately found in my Bible that night, “The Lord is good to all and his compassion is over all that he has made.” And I remember thinking how– ironic?– it was that in the end I would find a way to tell this story but that there would always be a sort of guilt or embarrassment to admit that my religion had meant something on the worst night of my life. I remember Urbanblight coming over after school with my “homework” and the smell of his green jacket while he held me. I remember watching TV with my mom and my sister, and how my mom stared at my sister suddenly– and I knew she knew that something was up, something wasn’t right. I remember Ucellina’s reaction– “Wow, I think you finally entered adolescence.” And I remember that it was very odd how life went on as if nothing happened.

A few months later Sister was skipping school with some friends and they were in a car crash, the day a new Children’s Hospital opened in town. She had a black eye– or more accurately, a startling RED eye, for some time afterwards. My parents were embarrassed and mad, and I imagine scared that she could have been more hurt. Her Catholic school made an example of them, overtly saying “see this is what happens when you skip school.” Sister had always been at war with the administration of her school on  a lower level, but this was the moment when things got really bad there, and for my parents with her. And I remember feeling powerless to protect  her from herself or from these various adults’ feelings towards her. I longed for her to find a sport or hobby, a class she enjoyed– but she settled on a boyfriend and smoked cigarettes out on the back porch while my parents either didn’t notice or pretended not to. Mornings especially were a nightmare, with my mother screaming upstairs, begging Sister to get out of bed and go to school, Sister yelling back to leave her alone. If ever a situation called for professional help it was this, but as far as I can tell my parents sought out no real resources for themselves or for her.

I recently was talking with the Doctor about my college selection experience, something I had not thought about in some time. It surprised me how quickly and deeply the pain of that time cut into me. Struggling and then choosing to go to Boston. Telling my parents my decision (in tears), and then telling my friends over the next 12 hours. My mom showing up at school unannounced to take me to lunch. Driving around while she told me that my father was “scared,” that we “couldn’t afford it,” that she didn’t think I “really wanted it,” and that I needed to go to school seven blocks from my house. Robbed of my decision, I sat in shock, anger, paralysis. My mother was purposely manipulating my emotions to keep me there. I think it was then that I became stubborn. It was then that I realized how hard I had to fight some things. It was then that the “outbursts” I sometimes get criticized for today (in my professional life surrounded by passive agressive types) became a survival mechanism I had determined I must learn. I had already told people. It had taken so much energy to embrace Boston and to make myself sign up– for me and my future, to choose to grow rather than to hold on to my childhood. And suddenly that couldn’t happen, because what was really important was that I protect my family emotionally, in every way.

The more I think about senior year the more I realize how complicated a time it was for me. I guess it is no wonder that 11 years later I would still be processing so much of it.

Eleventh Grade, in which I become something of a teenager three years late

Junior year was the year I swore for the first time. Actually, there are three times I can remember swearing– it happened so rarely that I actually remember them individually. The first was at Friend’s Party after a Semiformal for the Arts School. I didn’t go to my regular school’s prom but I went to these semiformals junior and senior year and I’m sure loved them more than I ever would have the prom. At any rate, at this particular after-party, I was being teased for never swearing and someone said “Just say shit.” To which I responded, “I don’t have anything to say shit for.” Suddenly realizing my mistake, I collapsed to the floor embarrassed while everyone else laughed.

The second was a particularly intense day of Tech week for that revue I was co-directing. I remember gathering Urbanblight and some friends cermoniously in the hallway, totally stressed and wanting to blow off steam– to utter the word “Fuck.” I guess you had to be there.

The third was extra special. Friend was graduating after having spent the year together in classes and performing, and I had grown pretty attached. He said that what he wanted for his graduation was to hear me say “Eat shit you motherfucking cocksucker.” Uccellina was a witness, so she can attest that I am not making this up. Suffice it to say, I said it and it actually made him cry.

Eleventh grade was also the year I saw my first R-rated movie– Pulp Fiction, no less– with all my “legal” friends on my 17th birthday. No I’m not kidding. We made an event of it and I was only slightly traumatized by it.

After that I pretty much returned to my Puritanical ways until college, but those incidents, in highlighting my abstinence in all areas of being less-than-perfect, helped to solidify my identity in a way, in that “innocence” was an identity. I was never moralistic– I had no judgement on how others were living their lives, but for some reason my expectations for myself were just this side of Amish. But somehow I had found a way in my artsy group of misfits and counter-culture loving teenagers who made a point of being “different” that that just happened to be what was different about me, and as long as I was sweet about it and didn’t tell them THEY couldn’t sleep around, it was cool. Having taken on that identity I became more comfortable in my own skin around then, and really started to care as much about hanging out with friends as I did about school or shows.

And hang out I did. I spent a lot of time hanging out in parking lots, which is what you do in a state that doesn’t provide much else for teenagers to do with their time. (I actually also remember we were so bored one night that we wandered around a grocery store. Our communities were so lucky to have such good kids like us that were turning to produce rather than drugs and looting like normal unstimulated adolescents.) The Ground Round Parking lot was our favorite but it was soiled as a hang out the first time a major fight erupted. There was a time when driving through my fair state that I had a memory of some fight my friends had at practically every fast food restaurant parking lot I came across. Usually the fights were spearheaded by the girls, who were jealous of each other a good deal of the time.  I by no means mean to imply that Urbanblight was faultless but I think its fair to say that he was often a victim of his own 16 year old guy idiocy, surrounded by women (who knew?) that sometimes just totally baffled him.

But that aside, my social life was now, and for the first time, a really important part of my to do list. I was still working hard in school and spending my summers working at theatre camp followed by three hour rehearsals in the evenings– but now afterwards and each weekend I was off to eat Cinnamon Dippers and salty popcorn for as long as we all could get along. I convinced Urbanblight to audition for the Arts school and he was accepted, and I happily looked forward to the socializing and academics, if not the college searches and finality of Senior Year.

Tenth Grade

I don’t think most people really would want to be 15 again. All 15 year olds think their parents treat them like they’re 12. I preferred 15 to 11, but it was definitely a complex time for me. In some ways I had come into my own, happy and challenged in school, more confident in general. I was in three plays that year, not including two that summer and theatre made so much of the other noise of my adolescence more bearable.

I had my 16th birthday party at a roller skating rink. I guess that says a lot. My friends had fun but it is certainly not the kind of party most 16 year olds would elect to have. As far as I can remember, I think it’s the last time I’ve been roller skating.

A few weeks later I went on an exchange student trip to Russia, in which my father was a chaperone. I fought hard against the trip but my parents– well, my father– saw it as an opportunity. I felt sure that you couldn’t go on such an adventure without coming back changed, and seeing as I had determined to never change, I was scared. It was the first major battle with my parents, and later battles would follow a similar pattern, in which I would ultimately give in and then carry resentment around for quite some time afterwards. The trip itself was quite successful in the end. I had to keep a journal as an assignment and the graduate student who was working with us commented that it wasn’t a quick read, that I wrote like someone much older than myself, and that it was clear that sometimes I didn’t quite know why I was there. I stayed with a girl who was clearly being raised as much younger than her real age, who beat to a different drummer. I cried when I realized that some of the Russian girls were making fun of how I dressed– I resented that even here it would seem there was something wrong with me. Looking back I realize that they were a clique against my young host, and that I perhaps was just a strange addendum to their odd relationship with her. After about two weeks in Moscow we had all had enough of our hosts and were happy to take a few days  in St. Petersburg to tour around and sleep in a hotel.

The more I think about that time in my life, the more I realize how much pain I was sifting through in my daily activities. My favorite teacher was moving and I mourned that loss as deeply as I had mourned anything before. I was struggling terribly in Algebra II, despite tutors and effort and parent meetings with the teacher. I felt so gratified when my mom told me, “He’s so hard to understand. You can’t ever just get a straight answer out of him.” I narrowly passed the class– by two points on my final exam. My father had lost his job shortly before our trip, and after a great deal of job hunting (and generally being told he was overqualified), he decided to seek help for depression. I remember this was a strange and almost shameful thing in the way it was talked about, or sort of NOT talked about in my family at the time. The doctor he saw started him out too high a dosage and he had a pretty averse reaction which I was sort of peripherally aware of.

Somehow things all sorted themselves out somewhere over the summer, where I had my first “job,” making $100 as an intern for the summer theatre camp I had attended the past couple years. I realize now it was slave labor, but at the time I saw it as free tuition.  It was also the summer that Urbanblight and I started to really become friends, as I embarked on my second small directing project out of my backyard, in which he played a leading role. I definitely feel nostalgic for that summer, hanging out in my backyard, being irritated by my sister and her friends, trying to make sense of the Pink Floyd songs Urbanblight insisted were great. They grew on me and it was the start of a year-long journey as we collaborated on our little rock musical production. We were young and foolish and having a good time at it. Most of all I think the beginning of those “planning” phone calls was in a sense the real beginning of a social life for me.

9th Grade

My dad drove me to high school most mornings on his way to work. I usually waited at one particular door (there were several entrances to choose from) for the bell to ring in the morning. My homeroom happened to be on the same floor as the Special Ed Resource Room, and so I was often waiting there with kids from that class who were usually sequestered away from my sight in Honors classes land. I remember that some of the kids drooled a lot and that one had a habit of hitting himself while he walked, and that this made me uncomfortable– and then guilty for feeling uncomfortable. I remember one boy asking me innocuous questions about the date and the weather, and deciding that I was nice based on my answers– and proceeded to share this with whoever would come by– “She’s nice!” In so many ways I was an observer of that little community, blacklisted from the rest of the school, and I was a little taken with how happy and social they were when I myself really didn’t have that there.

I spent my mornings in a high school with no windows, in a freshman class of 769 (we graduated as seniors with only 243). I lived for English class, and I thought my Spanish teacher, a Muslim woman with incredible grace and style, was amazing. I also had the greatest guidance counselor in the history of the world, and used any excuse I could come up with to go visit him in his office, which was stocked full of vanilla wafers and saltines. My other classes annoyed me for various reasons, but in many ways I learned that first year to coast through my mornings and it did not get to me much. My world revolved around my afternoons– when I could walk across the street to arts school. When I think of high school, it is the school of my afternoons that stands out most in my memory. That’s where my friends were and where my heart was.

I believe it was that summer that a gang war broke out on a street not far from my house. I had never been much of a navigator and had only a vague idea of where that particular street was, but it got lodged in my memory bank as a “dangerous place,” and whenever the street’s name would come up for years later it would put me on edge. This would become quite ironic when I attended college along one side of this particular street and discovered that to my white-bread classmates that particular street, rather than being synonymous with violence, was best known for being the location of the bar that didn’t card.

My summers continued to be filled with theatre, and in fact, I went above and beyond to fill my days with dramatics. Most of my summer I was in drama camp from 9-5 and then rehearsing for a local community theatre production 6-9. As my sophomore year loomed closer I got to know Urbanblight a little better, a friendship that would soon come to play a major part in my high school life. But for now we were basically acquaintances who shared a common annoyance with a certain other person (BR). I remember that summer between freshman and sophomore year, we were double cast in a play and had the chance to be brother and sister, and I was so disappointed we weren’t because that other kid had to be my brother. I have vivid memories of how he would whisper his “director notes” to me onstage, in one case during an actual performance, and it was among the first time in my life when I would actually admit to having a total distaste for another person.

Eighth Grade

Let’s see. Eighth grade. I remember I read a lot of L.M. Montgomery books around these junior high years, and that I liked the Emily series a lot more than I liked the ever-popular Anne series. I related a lot to Emily and there was still a writer in me, and writing was really the great dream of Emily’s. I continued to write a lot, and think of myself as a writer.

I think I got a little more comfortable in my own skin that year, saved by theatre in a way. School was something I did, and community theatre was something I lived. I had a good friend or two but more often I was most interested in the many pen pals I had managed to acquire. I loved my Algebra I class and the Saxon textbook-worshipping teacher. I had a crush on an Argentinian boy in class (though I always denied it), and he kissed me on the cheek at a spin-the-bottle moment at a party towards the end of the year. After two years of eating in a hallway, my school finally (after well over 40 years) built a cafeteria that actually looked respectable. It was kind of exciting, and ironic to be comfortable in a place I had rather disliked for quite awhile. My family’s thoughts had turned to high school and there was a lot of question as to what I should do next. There was a local arts magnet school that split time with the public schools that I had older friends at, this seemed like a viable option. There were also several private and parochial schools to consider, including one I fully fell in love with. But financial aid not being forthcoming, it seemed that I was destined for public school and signed up to audition for the arts program as soon as I could get my hands on an application. In this way I got around the drawbacks of the inner city public school, drawbacks which were no secret. Of the 17 kids in my “gifted” class in 8th grade, only 2 others went on to the high school in question. All of the rest were shuttled off to private and parochial schools, something I think our guidance counselor considered something of a personal mission. I remember talking to him one day while he explained to me why “all the good colleges are in the middle of the slums” and how skeptical he was that going to an arts school would make any sense. My dad, for his part, was for it– “all that time there will probably get it out of her system,” he said.

I remember at Eighth Grade graduation a lot of the girls wore crazy prom-style dresses that made them look, honestly, quite ridiculous. But then there was me. I wore this little ivory floral jumper I had had made, with a silk blue blazer that in no way matched– and called it dressing up. I’m sure I stood out like a sore thumb. I won an award, with my Argentinian love, for Spanish, not really because I was terribly good at Spanish compared to my other worthy classmates (though certainly he must have been), but because we were the least troublesome of the bunch. I also got an award in Creative Writing, and maybe something else. It was an embarrassment of riches, and mostly I was trying not to cry at my perceived losing battle against growing up while we sang some sappy song-of-the-moment, I think it was “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.”

Seventh Grade

Somewhere in this year I climbed out of what I now realize was probably my first major depression. With the exception of a day or two of homesickness I had another creative and spiritually fulfilling time at a Christian summer camp and spent a great deal of time out in my backyard– journaling, doing cartwheels, and catching fireflies. Having decided that teenagers were stupid I made up my mind to avoid becoming one and held fast to my childhood with all my might.

I was cast as a lead in a local production in a place that my readers know would continue to figure prominently, in one way or another up to this very day. That production led to an audition for a Teen Theater group that would come to be a huge part of my junior high and high school years as well. It’s funny to realize that it was not long after this time that I would meet most of the people who will have any reason to be reading this blog. Theatre certainly has been the connective agent in the vast majority of the important relationships of my life thus far. Acting became something I was praised for in this time period– and looking back I realize it was where I was most free to be myself. I was a bookish and rather quiet girl in my real life, struggling against an adolescence that wouldn’t let me escape– but onstage I found a place to just be happy and energetic in the unconfining space of musical theatre, and a place to explore aspects of personality I worked very hard to repress. I look back and realize that in the space of three years I played no less than four certified Brats, as rude and free as I was polite and tense. Somehow I got the attention of certain older performers I was with– kids that were sophomores, even seniors in high school, which seemed at the time to be incredibly old. One of those theatres had a tradition of a weekly Bowling Night and my parents would allow me to be driven home by one of those older kids. I remember becoming such an observer in this time, imagining myself a peer of people so much older, as my own peers largely seemed alien to me. My crushes at the time were on older boys who probably never would have dreamed how much their attention had mattered. Somehow I had gained their respect, and while they treated me as the innocent I was trying desperately to remain, many of them went out of their way to include me in their after-rehearsal circles.

My grandfather died in 7th grade, a few weeks before my 13th birthday. There was something in me that was oddly gratified that he would not know me as a teenager, because I had a certain terror about turning 13 that made me not sure I wanted to know myself then either. I woke up one morning and watched tv eating cereal in my living room as I often did, and my father was on the phone. We had gotten together with some extended family that weekend, and I had known that Grandpa had been sick. But Grandpa was, as Dad’s-Goddess-of-a-Cousin has been known to say, “a professional sick person.” In so many ways I had prepared myself over the past couple years, with so much visiting of Grandpa, for an inevitable bad day of bad news. There had been occasional scary moments when he would forget exactly where he was or become very angry with my father suddenly. There had been various operations and (sometimes quite unprofessional) reports from nursing staff we should “prepare” for the worst. So for some reason this particular weekend I hadn’t gone down that emotional journey of fear and expectation– I had just thought, yes he’s sick just like all the other times, and everything will be fine. I found out while eating cereal watching some cartoon. My dad was on the phone with my Great Uncle H, and he said “my dad passed away.” I don’t remember saying much that day, and I think I took a couple days off of school. My mom called her mother in Ohio and burst into tears telling her. My Aunt was staying with us  and had a rosary taken out and some kind of miniture statue of a cross on a nightstand, which all seemed sort of odd and enchanting to a 12 year old who had never really been introduced to the Catholic ways. My cousins came down and my favorite of the time, L cried when she saw us. We all went to dinner and it was so somber, and my mom had one of those awkward moments where its all so uncomfortable you get giggly and I tried to smile to ease the embarrassment.

We were at the front of the line going into the church for the funeral.   I sat next to my Dad and at some point burst into tears and he hugged me. I had never been in a church that had those little kneeling rails and almost jumped when suddenly they all flipped down and my dad and everyone else kneeled on them to pray. I realized that I had never seen my dad in a church except for a Christmas pageant or two, and I had certainly never seen him pray before. I don’t remember a lot else about the service except little oddities of Catholic mass I had never been exposed to and that the priest, who did the eulogy himself, called my grandfather had a lot of “spunk,” which was strange and apt all at the same time. My baby cousin W was 1 month old and slept through the service in a blanket my grandfather had had purchased for her when he found out her middle name was in honor of my grandmother. The priest came by to say, “I think we have a churchgoer!” I remember going out to the gravesite and it feeling weird to just leave the casket to be buried, while just across the way was the park we often played in where later in the day kids would be acting like nothing had happened even though for me so much had changed. I remember not realizing that he would be buried right alongside my grandmother’s grave and that that being kind of a comfort.

Then and now I have a longing to know who my grandmother, who shares my birthday, was. She died far too young for me to get to know her beyond a few happy pictures of us together when I was just a toddler.

I’m pretty glad I never have to be a Sixth Grader again

I got around to writing about Sixth Grade this week and my present anxiety level and workload made me think better of it for awhile– in every way I danced my way through Fifth Grade I felt stifled and repressed in Sixth. It was the year we moved to Connecticut. My grandfather had been in a nursing home for maybe 6 months I think, and the house was in my dad and aunt’s name, my dad’s consulting work wasn’t generating much, and he missed his family in Connecticut– so that was that.

All of my friends were going to the Cool New Middle School in Ohio and I got to go to the Orientation meeting “just in case,” as our house wasn’t officially sold yet. They had lockers and you got switch classes and when you got to 7th grade you could take Ohio History, which in my precocious nerdy little mind sounded like the greatest class ever. But we had a garage sale and drove to Connecticut to attend the same grammar school my dad had attended 40 years before. They did not have lockers. Or terribly clean hallways. And worst of all 6th grade here was still considered elementary school, and I was stuck in a class with Mr. M, who introduced himself by informing us that he was a very difficult person to get along with and was yelling left and right each day in ways that would have put my 4th grade scisssor obsessed teacher to shame. The day before 6th grade started we found out from a neighbor that you weren’t allowed to wear shorts in school (the first of many things I would find ridiculous about Connecticut schools), and my mom took us out at about 8PMin a desperate search for clothes because ALL we had were shorts (it was AUGUST after all) and the moving van was still 3 days out. I remember we got this blue pant suit that I hated and I had to wear it for three days. When I arrived at school I found that the rule was that you lined up with your class outside each morning and then were to be taken in as a group. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and said “Um hey– you’re in the boys line–” and a bunch of people started laughing. The boys line. There was a boys line and a girls line for every class. What is this, I thought, 1953? I had never heard of something so absurd in my life.

In 6th grade I sat in the front row and on my right there was a rather roundish boy named Jimmy. Behind me there was a very tall thin boy, also named Jimmy. Jimmy on the right used to ask me constantly, “How come you act so smart? Why don’t you just stay with the class?” Jimmy behind me used to inform me two or three times a day as to how ugly he thought I was.

I remember one day reading a story aloud in class that had something to do with a young boy who’s grandmother lived with him. Mr. M took this opportunity to tell us how elderly people don’t like going to convalescent homes because they know they are going there to die. I remember trembling in class, thinking of the grandfather that I had been seeing almost every night for the past month. When we first moved out there my dad went out to see him almost every day and I usually went with him. I visited for awhile but mainly hung out in a little library the nursing home had with old books about Austria and National Geographics I really liked.

About a month into school it was recommended that I transfer to the “gifted” class next door. The beginning of my interest in education really started with this first query that month– how was it that I was “gifted and talented” in one state and not in another? My parents debated it for awhile, first being against it and then coming around on the issue. I don’t honestly know how I would have survived mentally or emotionally if I had stayed in Mr. M’s class, but nevertheless the morning that I was to move out I burst into tears in an embarrassing display– it was just yet another transition for my miserable little eleven year old mind to process.

MS. M– my new teacher was a year away from retirement and had an old-fashioned schoolmarm sort of look about her. She was a spindly thing with very little sense of humor and always called me “young lady” which made me feel like I was in trouble. The first lesson of my first class in my new room was about doing long division. If you’ll recall, that is exactly the subject I had struggled for 3 years to even begin to master. To make matters worse, it wasn’t even real long division but this “short hand” version our outdated textbooks recommended, and Ms. M had an annoying habit of making everyone complete problems in public on the blackboard so she could humiliate them in front of others if they made a mistake, call them “young lady” and sigh a lot at what seemed to her at least to be a very easy endeavor. I had entered into a strange other kind of educating here– where classes spent months “studying” for the state tests, where narrative assignments would be returned for being too long, and where a mutiny broke out when Ms. M suggested putting up a poster outside our door that said, “This class loves to read!”

It did get better. A little. In some ways it was this foray into the worst possible learning environment that made me appreciate what I’d had and steeled me for protecting my own autonomy and learning. Many people are surprised that I attend school a notoriously downtrodden inner city district– and while I do maintain that there were a few extraordinary teachers and students I encountered in my time there– the fact is that by the time I got there I was already educated. I was reading on a high school level and checking out library books that I would later be assigned to read in graduate school.  Our school had a year-long focus on environmentalism and I wrote a silly little play that I think was called the Environment Machine and made an eye-liner mustache so I could be Mr. Litter. It was the first real time I’d been able to come back to drama and it would be that, it turns out, that would ultimately be save me from that school system.