Magic Bus

I had been lucky enough to walk to school until I started fourth grade, and I remember being envious of the kids who rode the bus. I even made a bus out of a white gift box left over from Christmas—I just glued  cardboard seats in there and put my dolls at various checkpoints around the room and had the bus driver pick them up. The fun part was figuring out which dolls got to sit together—one day Dusty was with Malibu Barbie, then the next it was Barbie and Strawberry Shortcake. The configurations were endless, and each day new best friends formed.

When I started riding the bus, I realized how wrong I had been.  

In fourth grade: an older girl named Nicole picked on my brother by sitting behind him and hissing “teethless, teethless” at him every day (he was six and had lost a bunch of baby teeth at once) and getting other kids to start in on the chant.

In seventh grade: an cute older boy in our neighborhood sitting with me  and pushing himself in really close, and putting his arm around me, to everyone’s laughter—which I later found out was a dare.

In eighth grade: taking the bus through some of the worst neighborhoods of Lowell, MA—tenements, chained animals, skinny and dirty kids.

In ninth grade: sitting next to a girl named Libby who was carsick but having the bus driver refuse to stop. Our Catholic girls’ school was on a field trip to a Mexican restaurant (yes, you read that right:  field trip to a Mexican restaurant). Then our teacher held out a cardboard  box for her to throw up into and I made a quick dash for another seat in the middle of the bus before it all went down. I remember the teacher grimly clutching the box and yelling to the back of the bus, “DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY TAMPONS? LIBBY HAS HER PERIOD!!!”  and everyone laughing. But also being terrified, because who knew PMS made you throw up? And what was she going to do with a tampon right there in that seat?

Gilford was not, as I had hoped, the end of my bus-taking. I didn’t turn sixteen until the second half of junior year, so I was late to start driving. That meant I had to take the bus, which was both humiliating and enlightening. The bus started at Governor’s Island first  and then made its way down Route 11 A, past  Patrick’s, toward Gilford Hills and the trailer park there, and then back toward the school. The last stop was at the bottom of Cat Path, a road I was grateful the bus didn’t actually venture up. On that bus I sat alone, because it was always a third full at most, even after everyone had been picked up.  No one even sat near each other, or talked. And it’s a testament to how much I hated the bus that I was grateful for this.

Crush

When I was a junior, I really liked a boy who was in a couple of my classes. He was generally considered dorky, I think, (which I also was) but I didn’t care because he looked just a little like Clark Kent  and he was more interested in Star Trek and chess than girls, so it was a challenge. I remember that this boy (whom I will now call Todd to protect his identity, though it will take you all of 20 seconds to figure it out) wore striped polo shirts and a constantly perplexed look, as though other people’s actions made little logical sense to him.

Todd was good at what I was very bad at:  math, being on time for class, mechanical engineering, and not really caring about high school because what came after was more important. When I told my best friend, Jill, that I liked Todd, she paused and looked at me. “Todd?” she asked. Then she had me clarify which Todd. Then she asked whether that was the same Todd that went to our school. I didn’t see why it was so hard to believe—you could tell he was going to be really good looking in ten years, and he was smart, too. His sister was a few years older and she was beautiful. Todd was also somewhat exotic, as he was from Gilmanton instead of Gilford, and I was  (and still am) a huge Grace Metalious fan. I imagined Todd’s family as going back generations in Gilmanton, and possibly being the basis of some of the characters in the book. It didn't matter that some of those characters did things like raping their stepdaughters or drinking themselves to death--that just meant he had a dangerous side.

So I made a great effort junior year to get Todd to talk to me, and then to get him to like me. I joined the chess club he started so I could spend more time with him (and learned how to play chess, too, so thank you, Todd). I would stop by the drafting room after school, where he used a slide rule to sketch designs at an easel-like table, and I would try to ask intelligent questions about what he was doing—mostly questions like “What are you drawing?” and “When are you going to be done with that?” Then Mr. Stone, who doubled as our driver’s ed teacher, would come in and give me the stink eye as though I had polluted the masculine sanctuary of the drafting room with my girly laugh and incessant talking.

Here is the crazy thing, though:  my technique of wearing Todd down sort of worked (as it would work nearly ten years later with my dear husband, but that's another story). By September senior year, when we came back to school, I was in both science and English with Todd. I noticed him being friendlier to me, even seeking me out during recess or after school. I officially found out that Todd liked me from, of all people, my freshman brother. For an entire day I was really happy—I imagined us bringing flowers to Grace Metalious’ grave, walking hand in hand down the hallways, him sending me a carnation for Valentine’s Day to show the whole school a boy liked me. I wrote in my diary that it was officially the first day of my relationship with Todd.

And the last:  the very next day I woke up and decided I only liked him as a friend. Just like that. And probably no more than two days later, he decided he only liked me as a friend and moved on to someone else. We did stay friends, though (at least for the rest of that year) and never spoke again about our almost-relationship. The last I heard, he had a really cool and interesting job (something involving creating a certain kind of guitar or amp?), which was no surprise to me. 

That's one thing that was so great about high school:  throughout almost all of it, you could change your mind about anything--your future career, your college choice, your part-time job, the person you had a crush on--and it didn't really matter. It was unlikely that you'd really do any lasting damage, to yourself or to anyone else, with these last-minute changes of heart. Or perhaps it just seemed that way.  

Breakfast at Tiffany's

I don’t remember why I left Dairy Queen, but one summer when I was in college I decided to apply at the Colonial House of Pancakes. I had good memories of rainy summer mornings at the pancake house, when we were tourists rather than residents. I always had the same thing:  chocolate pancakes drizzled with chocolate syrup and covered with whipped cream and a cherry. My brother had something called a “funny face plate” which was a pancake with bacon, cherries, and eggs on it to make the shape of a face. What was not to love? Summer mornings were busy at the pancake house, and I was tired of minimum wage—I imagined my apron pocket bursting with bills at the end of the day.

The “colonial” theme was still going strong, but that would change over the years. I am not sure what our forefathers would have made of deep-fried potato nuggets, or the bright red "strawberry" syrup at each table, but we had uniforms to help customers make the connection. Our first uniform was exactly like a French maid outfit but with a longer skirt—a black dress with a flared skirt, white piping on the neck and sleeves, and a white apron. I know we probably didn’t have a bonnet but we should have. I ended up giving the uniform to a college friend who wanted to dress like a “slutty maid” one Halloween. That was after the colonial theme had been dropped and we were now known by the name “CHOP.” We were instructed by management to call it "CHOP," too, not by the old name, which (inexplicably) resulted in many customers inquiring whether we were now a Chinese restaurant. If the new uniform revealed a clue to the revised theme, it eluded us:  it was the single most matronly outfit I have worn in my life—a cheap, calf-length polyester wrap-around skirt in industrial blue, with a brown plaid button-down shirt and navy apron. So cheap that the material had no weight to it, so cheap it wouldn't get wet when immersed in water.

A few Gilford students worked there—Brett, who graduated the year after us and whom I remembered for two things:  he was Erin Stimson’s boyfriend, and he had achieved an “A” in Mr. Lord’s physics class while I had barely scraped by with a D. Mary, who had the nicest hair I had ever seen (long, straight, shiny, and naturally blonde, in the late 80s when everyone wore it frizzy, processed, and huge.) But mostly, I remember Tiffany (not her real name). Tiffany was not from Gilford, but she knew a lot of Gilford people. She was someone my mother might call “a piece of work.” Tiffany had bleached blonde hair, a constant tan, and a raucous laugh that you could hear from outside the building. Although she was a waitress, she had the most expensive car in the parking lot, customers included:  a bright red Camaro complete with vanity plates that she always parked diagonally in two spots. She was older than the rest of us, but not by much, and her approach to her work was to make every customer hers—she would sit on bikers' laps, hug the regulars when they came in the door, joke with the older men, tell the women how beautiful they looked and how cute their kids were. We all thought she was a big faker, but she raked in the tips. This ambition was not limited to the pancake house—Tiffany was enrolled in Master’s Program and had big plans. Next to Tiffany, I felt like an immature slacker, even though by then I was in an MA program myself. The exchange with customers went like this:

Oh, you’re in a Master’s Program? Like Tiffany? I hear she’s going to open her own business.

Not like her program. In literature.

                   Pause. Oh. What are you going to do with that?  

The 1980s did not end well for Tiffany, or, for that matter, for the Colonial House of Pancakes. An unexpected pregnancy, the loss of her first professional job,   and all sorts of complications led to her transformation from object of scorn and envy to cautionary tale (“Don't spend more on a car than you can afford...look at what happened to Tiffany." "Tiffany was cheap with the busboys' tips, too, and look how she turned out.." )

As for CHOP, it became an Italian restaurant for a while and then closed for good. An internet search of “Colonial House of Pancakes Gilford” led me to a business trademark website that showed the various logos of pancake houses. Underneath the silhouette of the man in the colonial hat serving a big dish of pancakes were the words: “trademark: dead."


Which I guess is just as well. Visiting friends in Champaign, Illinois one year, we went to an "Original Pancake House" (a chain) and they served, instead of the little containers of half-and-half, pitchers of heavy cream to go with the coffee. You poured it in and it separated into chunky curdles. They garnished the pancakes with ice-cream scoops of butter. It was much easier to gain weight at the pancake house than at Dairy Queen, and that's saying something.

Queen of the Dairy Queen

During the summer of our senior year, I was told that the Laconia Dairy Queen was hiring. I knew three of the girls who worked there—fellow seniors Amy and Holly, and Dana (who had graduated in 1985.)

Having lived in the Midwest for ten years, I now know that our Dairy Queen was much smaller, and with a more limited menu, than most. The one in central Illinois had been a “Brazier” Dairy Queen, and it served a full fast food menu, featuring corn dogs, burgers, and fried cheese. It also had a drive-through, air conditioning and indoor seating—the Cadillac of Dairy Queens. Our Dairy Queen was a little box of a building, and when more than two people were in the back room it felt crowded; the front “fishbowl” part was even more confining.

I picked up my application form at the window one night, and it was hard to fill out in the ways that those part-time, minimum-wage applications are for 17-year-olds: you have to list things like babysitting and that mind-numbing job you quit after one week (Dexter shoes, walking down the aisles of the windowless basement to scan for out-of-place boxes, because we never had any customers.) The hardest part was knowing what to call the position I wanted.  Business parlance seemed too formal: “frozen dairy product salesperson?” “Dairy Queen associate?” “ice cream clerk?” but I worried  that “ice cream scooper” would limit me professionally—would I get stuck making soft-serve cones while the other girls got to make Blizzards and Buster Bars?

My mother’s helpful suggestion was “just say you want to be a dairy queen. Isn’t that what they call the girls who work there?” I am still highly skeptical about this.  It was a fact that they hired only girls for the front window. Not in a Hooters type of way (check out the shirts they had us wear) but rather like the Girl Scouts— we stood for wholesome and industrious young womanhood.

I ended up going with “ice cream clerk” and learned from our manager and fellow Gilford graduate, Holly, how to fill the Mr. Misty machine, how to make Dilly and Buster bars, and how to dip the cones in the warm greasy cone coatings without having them fall in there (and remain for eternity, because I don’t ever remember cleaning those things out—this is where Holly’s memory is probably a lot better than mine.)

It was probably the closest I have ever come to joining a sorority—former Dairy Queens, mostly pretty, happy young women in their twenties, would stop at the window and, mid-order, tell us when they had worked there: 1980, 1977, 1974. My fellow Gilford grads were mostly on their way to other places very soon—so we could tolerate pompous tourists and people griping about prices and cone sizes. A common complaint: we charged extra for whipped cream on a sundae. As Holly very logically put it, "It's easier to charge extra than to subtract the cost for people who don't want it."

Some summers when I am visiting my parents I think about stopping at the Dairy Queen and telling the girl (or boy, now)  behind the window when I used to work there. But I don’t, mostly because I remember how it was to be on the receiving end of such information. At the time, I never knew how to respond, but the years have made me more curious. Did they wear uniform shirts? Did they get to eat all the free ice cream they wanted? Had they called themselves “ice cream scoopers” even though though you don’t scoop soft serve?

Musically Challenged

Daniel Desario: I wrote out some Ramones songs. Nick Andopolis: The Ramones? They only use like three chords. Daniel Desario: So? I'll learn another one.
Freaks and Geeks, 1999


I am the last person who should be writing about music.


When my friend Kate (whom some of you know as Katie) visited me a couple of years ago, she brought me a 45 of Madonna’s “True Blue,” and it was blue. This was really nice for three reasons:  she remembered that I had liked Madonna in high school, it was a song about friendship, and you don’t get a blue vinyl record every day. Kate, Scott (my husband), and I were talking about music. “It was great that you didn’t care what other people thought—you liked what you liked,” Kate said. For a moment I sat back and enjoyed being that person who just doesn’t care what others think. But then I realized it wasn’t true. I wanted to shout I did care! I cared a lot! If you don’t even know that the music you like is bad, you can’t take credit for flaunting it.

Yet I have always been surrounded by people who not only know how to play music, read music, perform music—but who know music. Gilford itself was the Von Trapp family of high schools: the Stephensons, the Buswells, my friend Derek who played the oboe—beautifully—and went to Julliard. And there are the peole I met after—my friend Alex, who is in the band Constant Velocity—and is a classically trained guitarist. My friend  Elizabeth, who knows obscure film soundtracks, once kissed Gato Barbieri. And there is even my own husband, a vinyl record dealer who subscribes to Stereophile magazine, for whom we have a room in our house designated “The Record Room” and an overflow “Ex-Record Room.” Yet despite, or maybe because I am surrounded by people who know music, my biggest fear is someone taking a peek my itunes “purchased” list. If these ever become public I am shutting down my account.

I first realized the power of liking good music in middle school, when it was crucial to write the logos for bands you liked on your Three-Ring binders. I remember writing RUSH in fancy bubble letters, even though I loathed them, and the symbol for Van Halen and Def Leppard, even though in the privacy of my own room I listened to The Muppet Movie soundtrack, Olivia Newton John,  or Rick Springfield. One day in eighth grade, a mean girl named Monica asked me, in a threatening way, whether I liked Bruce Springsteen. It was not immediately apparent to me what the right answer should be. My guess was “yes,” and then she proceeded to ask me to name one of his songs I liked (this was before “Dancing in the Dark”, so I was stumped.) I don’t know how I avoided getting punched in the face that day, which surely would have happened if I had told her that I regularly listened to Duran Duran.

Nick Hornby once said that people stop listening to a lot of new music when they hit their thirties, and he indicated that this might have to do with our brains—it’s biological. If this is true, then it gives me some time to catch up.

Gilford Eagle Tribune

It's so noisy at the fair/
But all your friends are there

                                        Neil Young, "Sugar Mountain"

It became clear to me when I heard "Burning Down the House" playing in the Gilford Eagle Tribune production room that the yearbook was lame and the paper was cool—so I was desperate to make the switch. My main obstacle was Harry Proudfoot, whose standards were infamously high, and who (understandably) resisted the prospect of an untested yearbook quitter joining his staff. He ended up leaving after our junior year, and the word was that the paper would never be the same without him, like Van Halen after David Lee Roth.


 The production room was loud. People were always bursting through the double doors and making pronouncements. Across the hall was where journalistic magic happened: Dick Dumais' computer lab by day (hey, do you know he's back at Gilford? And that he looks exactly the same, except for a slightly shorter haircut?) and the press room by night. There was always someone around and it was the opposite of every job I’d had: instead of everyone doing nothing and trying to look busy, everyone appeared to be goofing off but stuff got done. 


I loved the way the paper staff was nostalgic for their adolescence even in the very midst of it: they listened to Neil Young's “Sugar Mountain” as they collated the copies at the end of each production cycle, and they told stories about the year before, and the year before that--crazy stories about all-nighters and working under Harry and students who had graduated.


I started on copy staff and moved to features. I don’t remember getting any formal instruction for writing the stories, but everything went through the editors who instructed as they saw fit. My friend Jill was the copy editor in our senior year. She had all of the qualities of a good copy editor: impatience, a sense of humor, and a deep and enduring hatred of bad grammar. She even ended up correcting letters I mailed her during our first year of college--she couldn't help herself.

I have advised a literary magazine at the college level, and in the process I have seen missed deadlines, misuse of funds, and all sorts of incompetent boobery. I don’t remember the Eagle Tribune missing an issue, and people actually read it (and least I remember reading it, cover to cover, each week).

When I did a one-day series of lectures at Gilford High a couple of years ago, about college writing requirements,  I brought a few old copies of our paper, for fun. The AP English class had just finished taking the big AP exam—the one that determines whether you get college credit-- and were arriving back to Rhetta’s classroom, relieved but still jumpy, speculating about how well they did. It was a strange, bittersweet moment—she was the same, they were the same, but I was not the same:  my AP test had been long completed and forgotten, and what mattered in that room was not achievement but pure, untapped potential. Suddenly, Rhetta called out to me: “I remember what you got on the test!” I felt briefly triumphant as she mentioned this in front of them (“that’s right, kids—that’s how it’s done!) until I realized how ridiculous it was. Really, had the test score mattered at all? And here they were, so anxious and hopped up, going through the exam question by question.

Anyway, I showed them the newspaper. I expected laughter, jokes about how old school it looked compared to their current paper, and comments on the front-page story about the smoking area (“you had a SMOKING AREA?") But that didn’t happen. They were, to my surprise,  genuinely impressed. They wanted to know how much time it had taken each week to produce an issue, and how we got people to read it.

“That looks great,” one of them said, after they took the time to sift through the copies, “I wish we had a paper.”

I wondered when it went away, and why, and whether it was another casualty of the internet age. Do high schools have newspapers anymore? As I left that day, I felt a little sorry for them, not because they didn’t have a paper necessarily but for the way they all bounced along the halls, listening to their own music, out the door after school to their own separate lives,  never listening to the same song in one room after school, telling stories about last year and the year before that.

Excuses

There is an entire magazine devoted to reunions.  I don't know what this must be like for its staff, but to an outside observer, it’s one of those publications that you can’t imagine an audience for, like Minature Donkey Talk or Modern Drunkard (these are actual publications that I am not going link to, lest they return the favor, so you will have to trust me). Issues feature reunion themes like “mermaids,” “plantations,” Ya Gotta Regatta,” and “Wild West.” Articles offer “reunion recipes,” and tips for reunion safety as well as surviving “the reunion committee from hell.” On a more somber note are features like “How Reunions Change People” and “Class Reunions as Catharsis.”

The magazine has its own website, and the whole project seems designed for the uber-planner, someone who does not want to miss one detail, because that will be the detail that ruins the reunion for everyone. But mostly, it seems determined to convince its readers that no, reunions are not as bad as they seem in the movies or on TV, and that it is the job of good planners to help attendees overcome their reunion resistance (it has a "top ten reasons people do not attend reunions" which did not include my reason for sitting out our 15th: sprayed by skunk, or the 20th: work thing requiring red polo shirt and lots of pep.) With the right amount of planning, the message seems to be, a reunion can be welcoming and fun.

Back in 1997, on a Christmas Break from graduate school, I went to the (dearly departed) Gilford cinemas—the one in the Osco/Star strip mall—to see a nearly empty showing of Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion with my friend Elizabeth, who was living in Boston at the time. It was not a good film by any standard, but we really liked one scene in particular. The class depicted in the film was from the 1980s, and while they looked far older than we do, in my opinon, it was a ten-year reunion. It was so over-the-top:  the metallic pastel suits (who wears a pastel pantsuit to a reunion? Besides Hillary Clinton?), the predatory leers of the grown up mean girls, just waiting to trip up poor Lisa Kudrow. And there I was, 28 years old--in the same theater I had seen serious movies like Out of Africa and the Color Purple with Kate Flaherty and Steve Norton and a group of other seniors eleven years before--back in Gilford and watching Romy and Michelle instead of writing my dissertation, traveling the world, getting married, having kids, or inventing post-its.

And that's sort of why I missed the 10th one, too. If Reunion magazine has it right, though, good organizing--perhaps a luau or dance fever theme--might have made all the difference.