I got this walk-down-memory-lane thing from Annika. Please feel free to talk about your own answers in the comments section.
HIGH SCHOOL QUIZ
What year was it?
Early to mid 1980s
What were your three favorite bands (performers)?
The Go Gos, Adam Ant, Devo, Cyndi Lauper
What was your favorite outfit?
I had this kind of 1950s-esque skirt I liked – and I would wear it with a maroon sweater (made by my mother – I still have it – I love it) – and pop pearls. Pop pearls were HUGE in my high school.
What was up with your hair?
My hair was short, always. I used MANY products to give myself spiky bangs.
Who were your best friends?
Beth, Betsy, Mere (you will recognize all the names … these chicks are STILL my best friends)
What did you do after school?
Drama club, school yearbook, school newspaper
Where did you work?
I worked at a local public library for about 3 years.
Did you take the bus?
Yup.
Who did you have a crush on?
Well, of course, every year in high school had a DIFFERENT crush. I will delineate them all for you here:
Freshman and sophomore year: John Walsh. He literally spoke 3 words to me- and my love for him lasted 2 years.
Junior year: I was MADLY in love with a guy named David Worthen. My friends will remember that one very well. We didn’t date or anything – but we were in French class and Gym class together, and … I thought my heart would literally take wing and fly me up out of the school, I loved him so much. Sadly, it ended in tragedy. (If NOT going to my junior prom with him counts as tragedy. And it does.)
Senior year: I moved on to older men in my senior year. I had an enormous crush on a guy in college I was doing a play with (yes, by the time I was 17, I had already moved on from the high school theatre scene) … he was 21 years old. I LOVED HIM. Nothing came of it, though. He’s still a dear friend. Also, in my senior year, I had a boyfriend, kind of. He was also older … 19? I don’t know. That ended in tragedy, too.
Did you fight with your parents?
Not really, although it wasn’t the best of times, in terms of our relationship. My grades weren’t very good in the first year of high school – and I think they were disappointed in me. It was a bit sketchy there for a while – I had real problems with math and science, and could BARELY get Cs and Ds in those classes.
Who did you have a CELEBRITY crush on?
My favorite question EVER.
So here goes: High school “celebrity crushes”:
Harrison Ford
Ralph Macchio
Blackie Parrish on General Hospital (ie: John Stamos)
John Taylor, from Duran Duran
Chevy Chase
James Dean (I didn’t care that he was dead)
Did you smoke cigarettes?
No.
Did you lug all of your books around in your backpack all day because you were too nervous to find your locker?
Uhm … no. Too nervous to find my locker? Huh?
Did you have a clique?
Not the way I see it. I had a good group of really cool friends – and they’re still my dear friends today. As a matter of fact, the core group of us are all getting together tonight, to drink wine, catch up, support each other, discuss our lives, and in general have a great time. I’ve been friends with these women since I was an unformed pubescent. I cherish them. So no, I wouldn’t call it a “clique” really.
Did you have The Max like Zach, Kelly, and Slater?
Oh I am showing my cultural ignorance here. Is this a Beverly Hills 90210 reference? Uhm … sorry. What is “The Max”?
Admit it, were you popular?
Popular? No. Although I think people liked me. I wasn’t part of the REALLY popular crowd … (the girls who always looked fabulous, and had boyfriends, and the guys who were football stars, and stuff like that) – So I wasn’t part of that clique – I was a drama geek. But I wasn’t UNpopular. (I was, indeed, “unpopular” in JUNIOR high. UNpopular? That’s putting it mildly. People put SIGNS ON MY BACK in the hallway, signs that proclaimed: “Hi! I’m really ugly.” I was tormented in junor high.) But that all died out by the time we all got to high school.
Who did you want to be just like?
This is ridiculous, but I SO wanted to be like Natalie Wood in Rebel without a cause. heh heh You know, the really rebellious hot girl, who gets hauled into the police station, and doesn’t CARE. I was WAY too cautious, in some respects, to EVER be like her (at least in high school) – but I just thought that character was too too cool.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
An actress. Also a wife.
Where did you think youd be at the age you are now?
My least favorite question. Even thinking about it, opens up a black abyss of despair and uneasiness. So I won’t answer it.
i’m sorry….what are “pop pearls”?
Don’t be sorry! They’re a string of fake pearls – and you can … how to describe this. You can “pop” certain pearls out of the string, if you want to have a shorter necklace … or you can “pop” a bunch of pearls out of the string, to make a bracelet …
I think they were very big in the late 50s and early 1960s … you can get them at vintage shops, and they were very big in my high school.
Sorry but now I just feel old. It’s the first question: what year was it? I was the Class of ’75. And culturally I’m having a problem because I went to 3 different high schools – one in Quebec, one in Ontario and one in Belgium – a U.S. overseas school for military brats (go SHAPE American High School!).
Back then, there were no VCRs or satellite tv so I am totally missing two years of pop culture. We listened to AFN and they played Casey Kasem’s American top 40 but I didn’t always pay attention to it. Oh well, the benefits from my peripatetic (no that’s not peripathetic!) upbringing far outweigh the negatives so I am not complaining.
I also grew up pre-VCR and stuff like that – I mean, they existed, but nobody had them. You could RENT them from a video store. I grew up in a world where our TV was small, where there were only 3 channels, and where after a certain point at night, there would be no more programming. Huh?
I think I can illuminate the “too nervous to find your locker.” In junior high school and my first two years of high school, I was not only an archetypal geek, but a ninety pound weakling as well, and therefore a perfect target for the kids in the remedial classes who enjoy doing things like slamming ninety-pound weakling’s heads into their lockers or stealing their honors class textbooks and extorting money to return those books. One learns in such situations that there are times when it is safe to visit one’s locker, and times when it is not.
It was not until many years later that I became sufficiently disgusted with myself to engage in a grueling few years of martial arts training and weightlifting to remake myself. In high school I didn’t have the money for martial arts, and my pacifist parents wouldn’t have paid for it, and I was too nervous to go into the high school weight room for pretty much the same reason that my locker was dangerous.
Did you lug all of your books around in your backpack all day because you were too nervous to find your locker?
This one reminds me of my biology teacher. My locker was right next to her classroom. And during morning break, she would ALWAYS eat canned fish (sardines I think) in the hallway outside. IT SMELLED AWFUL. I don’t think she even liked them, she just liked to make people flinch as they walked by. She was also known for wearing lights around the holidays. In fact I even remember for Valentines day she had red heart lights that she would wear. Are all biology teachers this nuts? or was I just lucky?
“The Max” was the burger joint where all the “Saved By The Bell” kids hung out.
Curtis,
Yes, as a matter of fact, I did lug all my books around in backpack all day.
Oh, the shame!
skillzy – you’re my hero. I knew that the Beverly Hills kids hung out at the Peach Pit … so I got a bit confused.
Bryan-
Thats awesome! You totally could have taken advantage of that and done curls with your backpack on your way to class. Beats the weightroom. I sympathise with ya though. It took me until my senior year of college to get my lazy butt into the gym.
It did indeed have the unintended secondary effect of building me up a little.
Another amusing thing. I never considered myself popular in high school. Mainly because I don’t like people. :-) But I don’t think that anyone in my high school figured that out. I somehow got voted friendliest in my class. I truly still don’t understand that. I think its because I learned how to hate with a smile. Ah.. if they only knew what I was really thinking.
I feel impelled to tell the story of my major high school crush, a girl named Natalie. Natalie and I were both in all the honors classes, so she and I would have several classes together each year, and I was pretty much in awe of her from the start of my freshman year, but I never had the courage to approach her. Most of you probably know who Rick Trevino is, the country-western musician. Rick was in my high school in my graduating class, and Natalie was his girlfriend for a long time, but they finally broke up, for what reason I don’t know, I think in our senior year. It was that year that Natalie and I were neck and neck in competition for third and fourth place in our class, but she bombed in honors calculus, putting her place in severe danger. Miracle of miracles, she turned to me for tutoring! One thing led to another, and I took her out a couple of times, and it quickly led nowhere.
Nevertheless, I cherish the bost that I dated one of Rick Trevino’s girlfriends.
Oh Sheila, you know I have to do this fully. Have high school on the brain CONSTANTLY, b/c I’m working on a young adult novel.
Ok: I was class of ’88. I loved Adam Ant, too, but he was more seventh grade for me. In high school I loved Michael Hutchence of INXS. Loved him to DISTRACTION.
My other celebrity crushes were Colin Firth (I saw the boarding school film, Another Country, twenty-five gazillion times), and Rupert Graves (who I loved as Freddy in A Room With A View – yes, I think we all know, I was the most hopelessly anglophile child in all the world). I think I had a Hugh Grant thing too, because of Maurice – his floppy schoolboy hair was so spectacular in that film, it was like a separate character.
My favorite outfit was black jeans with a maroon sweater. Which may still be my favorite outfit. I also had a ton of mock turtlenecks from Canal Jeans, and always wore Doc Martens.
I had long girly hair. I tend to keep it shorter now, and almost can’t bear to have it long, because it brings back painful high school associations.
My best friend was Julie, we instantly bonded in 7th grade, but then we drifted apart slowly over junior and senior year. And it broke my heart. (This is emerging as the main theme of the ya story – I’m apparently still heartbroken about it.)
After school I either went to Julie’s house or wandered miserably around the upper east side of Manhattan, like a waif. I had a terrible relationship with my mother at the time, and felt like I had no home at all.
I took the subway to school.
Crushes: Jeff G., Andrew M., Evan H., Alex W. The last was a doozy. More obsession than crush. I still haven’t recovered.
Interestingly, I recently ran into a guy from high school that everyone ELSE had a crush on (all my friends thought he was totally hot – but I was oblivious, because he wasn’t Alex), and we ended up talking for nearly three hours, and could barely drag ourselves away even then. It was really really strange. We had a whole shorthand, almost a private language, which we fell into immediately. And I realized I’d spent half my high school career talking to this person, because he was friends with Alex, and always in his vicinity, but I didn’t have a crush on him, so he was easier to talk to. And talk to him I apparently did. But not that consciously.
Is this the longest comment ever?
I was friends with all the popular girls, but not supreme goddess material myself. I think I gave good sidekick. I was loved, not feared. All the nerdy guys in my school asked me out – every single one – because they thought I was the most accessible popular(ish) girl. When of course my heart belonged to Evan/Alex, &c. I didn’t even notice the freakin’ hot guy who was secretly my best friend, I was so focused on them.
Who did I want to be like? Hmm. I think I wanted to BE Freddy/Rupert Graves. I’ve always been interested the inside of male friendships (which, by definition, I can never experience for myself). Whenever I was attracted to someone, it was usually in the context of his friendship to some other boy. I was interested in both Alex and his friend Ivan. (And from this distance, Ivan seems like the more interesting one.)
When I grew up I wanted to be a marine biologist. That went by the wayside once I… started taking biology.
In terms of where I thought I’d be – my thoughts of the future were about generally about finding love. But I think I realized, even then, that there was some inherent impossibility in my desires and romantic dreams. Because I – clearly – couldn’t actually be Freddy. Or achieve whatever essential Freddy-ness I was going for. The closest I’ve come is probably in my friendships with gay men. (And they were all in love with Freddy, too. It seems like every gay boy I’ve met has a Freddy story.)
Stuck in adolescence much?
Not to be rude, but Chevy Chase? Slipping on a banana peel Chevy Chase? Vaguely creepy-uncle-like Chevy Chase? Does not compute.
I too remember Ye Olde Tyme TV – UHF Channels, where you have to hold onto the channel knob or the rabbit ears to get grainy reception on old Lone Ranger Episodes (I’m not THAT old – HS class of ’88).
So much of this is foreign, as I went to an all-boys school. Not having any sisters, I had real communication problems with women. Mrs. Skinny might say I still do sometimes. :)
Hell yeah, Chevy Chase.
First of all: Saturday Night Live. he and Jane Curtin doing the Weekend Update. “Jane, you ignorant slut.” He set the standard for that segment on SNL, in my opinion. Nobody else can come close. I see re-runs of it, and I still laugh.
“Good evening. I’m Chevy Chase. And you’re not.”
Second of all: Seems Like Old Times. LOVE THAT MOVIE.
Third of all: Foul Play (another pairing with Goldie Hawn) – and he was awesome in it.
This is early Chevy Chase. What was the other movie … where somehow he becomes radioactive … and glows in the dark? It’s SO DUMB but I loved that guy.
Mainly though, my crush came because of his general cynical HOTness doing the Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. Not to mention his hilarious pratfalls when he would play Gerald Ford.
I was high school class of 85, skinnydan. We still had a black and white television until … Jeez, yesterday??
haha
Most important – did you have the pair of pliers for changing channels when the knob broke off?
Why Not
The High School Quiz, courtesy of Annika and Sheila….
Memories of the Way We Were
Got this from the Redhead.
Good taste in music, Red…Adam Nt, etc.
David:
After your unbelievably rude tone in my last music post (about being unable to find Queen at Barnes & Noble) – I am now sad that I DIDN’T list here my eternal love for U2 and the Beatles. Just to go up your ass.