The (Partial) Rememberance of Things Past

Wow. I just had the exceptionally rare experience of feeling nostalgic for high school.

Okay, not high school per se, as I'm rarely nostalgic for Stanton College Preparatory School. However, I do often think of/miss my friends from high school.

Yesterday, Mollie sent me some pictures of us from back in the day. One of them was of us at a party at my house; one that I'd forgotten entirely until I saw the pictures.



AVOVE: Me with a bad perm, age 17. Back of photo reads "reenacting the death scene from Heart of Darkness." (WTF??) At least the horror! the horror! pretty much sums up my hairdo. Not to mention that shirt. As I said to Mollie, one of the great consolations of getting older is that I will never, ever, have that hairstyle, or make such reckless sartorial choices, ever again.

The invitations, which for some reason were printed on paper doilies, read, "Oh, wow! It's a Luau!" The fact that I mailed them suggests that there was an entire thought process behind this. I said to my self, “I should have a party.” Then, “No! I should have … a luau.” And, somehow, what followed logically was, “where’s them doilies?”

I'm not sure what's more disturbing: that I made and actually sent out invitations to a luau on paper doilies, or the fact that I have no recollection of doing it?

The whole idea would make a lot of sense if I had been high. But alas, at age 17, I had never even smoked a cigarette, much less anything else. The only booze I'd ever had was the occasional half-glass of wine with dinner with my parents, usually only in Europe where they don't frown on people under 21 (or, say, under 12) quaffing a few.

Going through these bits of our past, we all have to become forensic anthropologists. You try to remember the name of the brown-haired guy in that drunken group photo – you didn’t write anything on the back, because you were so sure that it would always be perfectly obvious. Now, all you know is that he was a dude at some party, years ago, and that his name started with an “H” …. ? Definitely an “H.” That, and you dated him for 3 years.

We find notes to ourselves and passionate references in journal entries to someone named “S.” Who exactly was that? It’s like decoding Linear B.


[It's funny. In most photos, I look drunk. Usually, this is at least partially due to the fact that I am. But here's proof that you don't have to be drunk to look drunk. And notice -I'm reading a book. Because that's what cool kids do at parties.]

Now, all these years later, I can only wonder – why a luau? I sincerely hope I meant it ironically, and that the paper pineapples and leis were supposed to be "kitchy," but chances are, I didn't, and they weren't. All of my parties were adult supervised and alcohol-free, which makes the photos that much harder to explain.

At the risk of giving any undue credit to a school that is the source of at least 85% of my billable hours of psychotherapy over the years, I don't think we realized how lucky we were, on some level, to be at a School for Dorks.

Stanton was kind of like the school on "Fame," only nobody could dance. Instead of being a school for the arts, it was designed for the "socially challenged." Okay, techincally it was for kids who wanted to Take Over the World, like The Brain from the Animaniacs (I'm pretty sure I only got in because my parents knew the principal, or maybe because the person in charge of admissions was drunk that day).

In Florida, "gifted" (the quotation marks are key) students are given the same status and rights as all Special Ed. students. Many of us even took a short bus to school, bussed in from whatever public high school we would have been at if not for Stanton. In ninth grade, I took the bus to the local high school before getting onto another bus to go to Stanton. On those bus rides, I got a look into what life might have been like at normal high school. Like most of the kids at the front of the bus, I would have been eaten alive.

It wasn't a bad or dangerous high school or anything. Just your average suburban Florida school. But I don't think acting out scenes from Joseph Conrad novels would have been very endearing.

All the kids at the "normal" high school looked about 30. Some of them had kids. They smoked, and drank beer, and had sex, and did all of the things that we could only wonder about as we discussed the latest Phillip Glass recording with our Gay Best Friend. It was kind of like Sex and the City, only without the sex. Or the City. But the "and the" part - that was SO us.

We read The New Yorker (we lived in Florida - even back when it was a Blue State, everyone thought The New Yorker was the guy who was responsible for all the traffic, not to mention all the litter, on the highway). We listened to The Smiths and The Dead Milkmen and The Cure, but preferred "the old Cure," of course.

Stanton was rather neurosis-inducing, because everyone (except me, that is) was brilliant and ambitious, and most of the girls (except me, that is) could have probably had thriving careers as runway models if not for their burning desire to get several Ph.D.s from Yale and find a cure for cancer (yes, Dagny, if you're reading this - I mean you).

I graduated at the bottom of the class. Or, as I like to think of it, the "inverse valedictorian." It's kind of like getting one of those ribbons that say "Participant" when you come in last at the Special Olymics. Which seems strangely appropriate, considering we were taking a short bus to school ...