School Notebook

Another busy Friday with little blogging accomplished, but at least I haven't forgotten my memory, which is an improvement, albeit a slight one, I'll cede, over last week.

Since it's that time of year and since it's been on my mind since recently hearing an old OMD song -- not one I recalled but nonetheless which reminded me of their greatest hit, "If You Leave," which of course appeared on the amazing and award-deserving soundtrack for delicious 80s movie "Pretty in Pink," which culminated with age-appropriate melodrama at a high-school dance -- today's recollection concerns prom.

I attended high school in the 1980s, an era of big sunglasses and big hair and even-bigger shoulder pads, when C. Thomas Howell was considered a hunk and us kids were too naive to see that George Michael was gay. It was the age of new-wave music and The Facts of Life, of Valley Girl and "gag me with a spoon" and baby-oil at the beach and oh how I miss ye, California Coolers.

Every dance every year was a big deal at my school, from the semi-formal homecoming to the uber-casual (we were actually supposed to dress on the sloppy side) TWIRP -- a fancy name for a Sadie Hawkins dance, i.e., The Woman Is Required To Pay. But prom, which was reserved only for juniors and seniors, was, may I say, the shiznit.

Plans were belabored and fretted over, as were wardrobe possibilities, transportation options and strategies for breaking curfew and partying into the wee hours (sorry Mom). The boys especially aimed to stage elaborate one-act plays in their asking of girls to accompany them.

My senior year, my eventual date, Chris, opted for the painfully public and on-the-spot style of asking me, in his hatching of a plan to make said request during the open-question portion of the regular meeting of our student government, of which I was vice president and he was something-or-another (I am now pushing 40, so I don't remember everything).

To really ramp up the embarrassment factor, he attended this meeting outfitted in a powder-blue suit, repleted with a pirate-esque puffy shirt and an unfortunate, equally cheesy cumberbun. Brutal.

Unlucky for him, but to the not-small delight of my fellow council members who thought it was all very hilarious, Chris had not received the memo, as it were, that I was to miss that particular meeting.

Yes, it's true. While he was wandering into the government room, all tuxed up and eager to secure me as his date, I was flat on my back and full of nitrous, having my wisdom teeth removed. How do you like them apples?

When I later returned to campus -- I have no idea why I went back to school after that; what a perfect excuse for taking the whole day off! -- at least a dozen people informed me, most through belly-deep guffaws, what happened before Chris himself was able to locate me.

By the time he did find me, he'd changed out of that hideous outfit and abandoned his by-now well-leaked plan and simply said, "Well I guess you know I'm gonna ask you to Senior Ball. You wanna?"

Although, I'll admit, I was inclined to hold out for the invitation for which I'd really had a hankering (ain't that always the way?), I felt I had to acquiesce due to his great, yet-ultimately failed efforts to make a big to-do, and also not wanting to cause him greater embarrassment vis 'a vis a denial than he'd already suffered in the asking. Or the not asking, as it were.

And so I said yes. And so the day arrived.

There I was all dolled up in my taffeta, puffy-shouldered dress, my hair curled beyond belief, my bangs defying gravity so high were they sprayed with what was I'm sure a far-from-eco-friendly aerosol of some form, my blue eyeshadow and frosted-pink lipstick the icing on my personal cake. I'll just tell you, I looked hot!

The doorbell rings. My mom goes to retrieve young Chris while I retrieve his boutonniere from the fridge. I hear them chatting. I make my way toward the living room. I...

...gasp at the sight of him.

There he stood in the entryway, all smiles, dare I say radiant, clutching my corsage in his tanned hand and wearing -- that's right -- the very same powder-blue, pirate-shirt tragedy that I had accidentally but so gratefully avoided by spending that earlier day pinned under a dentist's drill.

The moral of today's tale: You can run, but you can't hide.

Happy weekend, y'all! I'm out!

Posted by Shelly Leachman at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't know about the moon, but my own memory is impressively intact, though sometimes spotty (I blame my college years, for reasons I won't delve into here, but to which I'm sure almost all of you can relate).

Allow me to quickly apologize for not posting this on my way out the door Friday eve, as I've always promised to do with these flashbacks, but I had three stories due that day and as a result did not accomplish much blogging at all (read: zilch). Forgive me, si'l vous plait.

Maintenant, on to the main event. Can you guess what it is? I've given you a hint. Mais oui, today's memory concerns my study, sort of, of French, which lasted from seventh grade through my senior year of college.

Sadly I don't recall much of le francais, other than the few phrases you'll find here and the simple fact that I was enrolled in some form of French class for the better part of a decade, but that's probably largely because I've so far spent only four days in my entire life (which is nearing upon, oh, 13,605 days now, wow) in France, and those days occurred when I was 17, which, I'll tell you without being entirely specific, was a really long time ago.

But I digress.

Something this weekend reminded me of my high school French teacher, whose name is totally escaping me (probably for the best, for her sake), but whose penchant for wearing leather, especially this shiny, red, almost-patent leather (it could have been pleather, tragic) zip-up dress, with which she sported some crazy-high heels, is forever implanted in my mind. Did I tell you I was in Vegas this weekend?

Anyway, Madame, as we'll call her, since I can't recall her name for the life of me, at the beginning of every semester would pass down the aisles a list of French names. We each had to pick one and for the remainder of the year, we would known within her classroom walls by that name. Those of us who stayed on year to year retained the same name the entire time.

Due to my being late the first day freshman year and not getting a look at the list until everyone else had already made their selection, it was slim pickings for me, and I ended up with Yvette. No offense to any Yvettes out there, but at the time I really thought that Cecile or Juliette would better become me. Alas it was not to be. So Yvette it was and Yvette it would stay.

Madame also had a rule that took effect each day about 10 minutes into class and stayed put until le fin, under threat of punishment. Said mandate was what she called "pas d'anglais," or, basically, "no English," meaning that after roll taking and general housekeeping stuff at the start of class we were forbidden from speaking our native tongue until were excused for the day.

Je detestais pas d'anglais (I hated "no English"). Probably because I didn't know much French, although I did eventually master enough vocabulary to, when I visited Paris for a few days over the summer between my junior and senior years, adequately enough order beer (la biere!) and acquire directions to a Burger King, which serendipitously sat close enough to l'Arc de Triomphe to allow us to kill both the day's mandatory sight-seeing and burger-craving birds with the same stone.

I would actually go on to make a similar short visit to Paris the following summer, post high school graduation, during which I fondly recall drinking cheap wine (le vin!), the bottle fashionably wrapped in a brown paper bag, while sitting in a park with friends quite near the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Since then, and despite my best intentions, embarking earnestly, as I did, on a double major in French literature at UCSB (I dropped it to a minor when I couldn't get through the linguistics class requirements, pop-quiz-heavy tedium that they were), not to mention being a fanatical tennis fan with a not-small urge to one day witness in person the glorious red clay of Stade Roland Garros, I have yet to return to France.

But you know what? Madame's racy-for-a-high-school-teacher wardrobe aside, I remember enough of the language to have made it all worthwhile.

When the mood strikes or it seems like a good idea, I'll bust out a few key phrases to impress strangers at a party. And, more importantly, if an undesirable inquires after my name I always reply: Yvette.

Posted by Shelly Leachman at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That's right, it's memory time again. As I said last Friday, I'll now make my last entry of each week a remembrance of my own that somehow pertains to school or my former life as a student or what have you.

Capiche? Cool.

Today I turn to a page from elementary school, fifth grade to be exact, and a class trip to an environmental camp called Sly Park. Going there was a rite of passage for fifth and sixth-graders among schools in our area, a trip made every fall and the source of pre-arrival jitters based mostly on the long passed-down rumor that among the required activities at Sly Park was eating a live worm.

As it turned out, the proffered worm was in fact an optional snack, but anyone who successfully swallowed one got a special T-shirt bearing one of the slimy guys in the formation of a lightning bolt, with "SLY PARK" spelled out in big block letters through its center. Needless to say, and perhaps foretelling of the timid palate I retain to this day, I declined the nightcrawler and was perfectly satisifed with the butterfly-adorned shirt reserved for unadventurous epicureans like me.

So in fifth grade, I'll just come right out and tell you, I was a total tomboy. We are talking Tuffskins and sneakers and the occasional football jersey (Los Angeles Rams - old school!); baseball hats, pocket knives, dirt bikes, et al. My BFF at the time was this kid Joey, with whom I would regularly ride said dirt bikes and play by the creek, collecting polliwogs and crawdads and sometimes small frogs (we'd get them all in a bucket with water, stare for a while then toss them back) and poking mud with sticks, because somehow poking mud with sticks is fun when you're in fifth grade. Go figure.

At some point, I guess because we got along really well and he was a boy and I a girl and maybe because it just seemed like what we were supposed to do, Joey asked me to "go" with him, as in go steady, as in boyfriend-girlfriend stuff, people. Actually his friend Aaron asked on Joey's behalf, instructing me, if my answer was yes, to stand in the center of my driveway after school one day and just wait. I did, and soon enough Joey rode up on his bike, stopping long enough to kiss me (to be precise, he licked my face as my lips remained locked up like the Hello Kitty diary I kept next to my bed) then simply ride away again.

We never spoke of that incident and our friendship proceeded as it always had, except that we were now "going," which didn't seem to be much more than something to tell people and pretend like it made us somehow cooler.

Now back to Sly Park. Like I said, I was a tomboy, and as I think I told you last week I was also, at this age, pretty painfully shy. So being stuck in a cabin with, A) a bunch of girls when all your friends are boys and B) a bunch of girls you don't know very well when you're shy was pretty much, well, torturous, and I recall counting off the days in my head and desperately wanting the week to end.

About halfway through the trip, Aaron -- friend of Joey and I, same Aaron who asked me to go with Joey -- made a similar unexpected approach, finding me outside the girls' cabin as I made my way to the dining hall, walking beside a camp counselor since I was too shy to befriend anyone else. So he comes up and says, "Joey isn't going with you anymore. He's going with Sunny now."

Shocked and dismayed -- as much as a fifth grader can be shocked and dismayed at the loss of something she never even knew the meaning of, which is to say, A LOT -- I asked him why.

"Because she's prettier than you."

Ouch.

I thereafter began counting down the minutes until we returned home and every second until we boarded the bus I felt smaller and shyer (or is it shier? more shy? I'm having a vocabulary lapse, which I'm allowed at 5 p.m. Friday, right?) than I ever had before. Bottom line: It totally sucked.

After a temporary rift -- i.e., two days of not speaking and looking at each other awkwardly -- Joey and I were able to resume our friendship. It helped that Sunny dumped him the day we returned from camp for a fourth grader (a younger man, egads!), I believe his name was Cobe, who, she told Joey, "is cuter than you."

The moral of the story: Even fifth graders have karma issues.

Postscript: The very next year, Sunny and her girlie crew, for whatever reason I never actually knew, decided to take me under their wing and make me their "project," and it wasn't long before I'd tossed out the Tuffskins and was shopping at the Esprit outlet in San Francisco, wearing blue eyeshadow and pegging my pants, begging to have my ears pierced and, having miraculously been coaxed out of my shell and into an actual social circle for the first time, was hosting parties wherein we'd all link arms and dance Rockettes style to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun."

What a difference 12 months makes. Take heart, shy kids. Take heart.

Posted by Shelly Leachman at 5:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Memories, of the way we were...

Ahhh, memories, sights and sounds and images tucked away in the far reaches of our brains, now and then emerging out of nowhere to remind us of what once was, whether that once was was good, bad or ugly.

Starting today, I'll finish every Friday with a memory of my own, dredged from that part of my own mind-bank where I've stored all my past experiences school-related, however remotely, so as to stay on topic, this being a school blog and all.

Since this is my first stab (and also since I'm eager to start my weekend -- TGIF!), I'll make my inaugural rehashing on the short side, employing as much brevity as possible (my intro is long enough, I know) in regaling you with my recollection of the first time I was forced to endure a school picture session.

It was in preschool, I was wearing a forest-green turtleneck and my hair was cut into something of bowl, though my bangs were somewhat squared off. And then there was that unfortunate cowlick that remains to this day.

A shy girl with a distaste for speaking to, much less interacting with, anyone other than my parents, my sister and select friends, I was, to put it mildly, extremely displeased when a strange man came at me with a comb -- pulled, by the way, from a large jar stuffed with the plastic contraptions, which at the time didn't occur to me but now that I think about it was very hygienically suspect -- then proceeded to instruct me to "smile pretty for the camera."

I did not comply. In fact, I went the opposite direction and, as I was often wont to do in my childhood (as I'm so frequently reminded, still, by my sister), I swallowed any semblance of a smile and instead shoved my bottom lip out as far as I could get it and settled into the poutiest pout you ever did see.

And I wouldn't budge, despite the photographer's pleas -- not to mention those of my teacher, who was there with the rest of my class, all lined up and awaiting their own closeups -- to please smile. Just once, please.

It was not to be. And so he took the picture of pouty preschooler Shellly, a picture that to this day hangs on the wall at my parents' house, forever reminding me -- with not a little pleasure, I must admit -- of the fiery toddler that was and how, as just wee 5-year-old (wait, are you 4 in preschool, or 5? I forget), I managed to so fluster a grown man.

Happy weekend, y'all. Send your own school memories to me anytime: shelly.leachman@dailybreeze.com.

Posted by Shelly Leachman at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)