Somebody once told me that high school should be the best years of a person’s life. What a load of crap! Perhaps if a person was the most popular kid in school and star of either the football team or cheerleading squad, completed by his/her own personal entourage of teeny-bopper admirers... then maybe. I, for one, can only wonder how existence could have gotten more dreary or tedious. How sad that statement would have been had it been true!
My life following high school has been filled with the most exciting of floods, fires, back injuries, uterine anomalies, divorces, and hives… all of which were far more entertaining than high school! It is only after cliques, SATs, driver’s ed. and high school graduation that we learn the most deliciously wonderful lessons life had to offer. The best part of the whole process is that these lessons are abundant, worthwhile, free, endless and quite unlike algebra, useful. Some of them are quite difficult and others may allow us to transcend to a point within ourselves beyond anything we ever thought possible.
The biggest lesson I learned in high school was that I was a socially inept looser, doomed to a life of dull mediocrity. There were thirty-eight of us in my graduating class at a private all-girls school outside of
High school was a very interesting study in social behavior. Even with such a low number of students, the school still had the same kinds of cliques every large, public high school has. We had the Over Achievers, The Athletes, The Beauty Queens, The Street-Wise Tough Kids, The Brains and The Losers. Either one fit in, or one ate lunch alone every day.
It seems to me now that I was a one-of a kind. Of course back then it seemed to my peers and me that I was just plain weird. My passions included art, writing, theater and horses. I landed a role at a nearby college in a production of Peter Pan. The group performed each weekend for a number of months and then the show was extended to weekdays. We performed for area schools and later, traveled to schools well outside of our area. For me the best months I had in high school were the ones I was away performing with the group on a professional level. I received assignments from my school and completed them on the road. The few moments out of my week that I wasn’t performing, I could be found on the back of a horse, gallivanting about the countryside. Much to my chagrin, the show had to come to an end and I had to go back to high school. Oh, the horror!
In addition to my other oddities, I went to a girl’s Catholic school at the same time I was going through a “questioning everything” phase. As I was sort of a Presbyterian, I often chose not to attend Mass, to stay silent during certain prayers and to ask where all the dinosaur bones came from in religion class. This little quirk earned me the title of Class Rebel. Oddly enough, out of all the pious Catholic girls in my graduating class, I would count myself as one of the least rebellious I knew. Nobody knew me well enough to care what was hidden in the 5”0” frame toped with short, blonde hair. I believe I was voted “most likely to write a screenplay called ‘My Life at the Barn’” by yearbook staff members that had spent all of ten minutes conversing with me in our four year high school careers.
A few extra-special school memories come to mind. There was the time I got my hair cut rather short and styled in a spiky manner that was very “in” for the ‘80’s and worked well for my male role in Peter Pan. As I arrived at school, one of the teachers walked up to me and said in a honey-sweet tone “I think I liked it better before you had it cut.”
I was thinking “Ok, well I’ll just grow it back before the bell rings” as loudly as I could. Of course I just smiled and nodded like a good little girl.
This same extra-special teacher found out the next year that I regularly went down town to be on an ‘80’s American Bandstand type TV show called Dance Party USA (I hear tell that Kelly Rippa was on the same show but I can not personally substantiate those rumors). I was called to the office to discuss the matter. This teacher felt it was “inappropriate” to take part in such an activity. Dancing! What might come next… happiness and joy? If only she knew what some of the other girls in my class did after school. At least the whole country knew what I was doing and who I was doing it with.
With the exception of my wonderful high school English teacher who thought I could actually be somebody someday, the staff did not overly approve of my plethora of curious extra curricular activities and personal habits. Working at a horse barn in the mornings and coming to school smelling like an equine was unladylike. Early in my senior year I blatantly ignored the pleas to park my 1973 Chevy Caprice Classic elsewhere and by doing so I am sure I completely obliterated the school’s wealthy image. Traveling with a theater group practically made me a gypsy, and dancing on TV? Well, it was obvious I’d be going to hell someday. In my opinion I graduated from there in 1987.
As most other adolescent girls, I survived high school. I was never popular and I was never on the honor roll, but I survived that too. I was accepted early admission into
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