High School Musical

This is an actual picture of my high school in Dunedin, FL. It looks pretty much the same as it did 500 years ago when I was a student. The tree in the center used to be just yea high.

I recently got an email from this kid I went to middle and high school with in Dunedin; he was always one of my favorite people because he was smart and sarcastic and pro-choice at the age of 12 (even though, for a time, I was adamantly anti-choice b/c of my friend Julie K. who brought in this pamphlet "written" by an unborn fetus. I think the last line was something like "You killed me today." Very powerful stuff for a preteen). Adam may now be a Republican, but maybe not. He and every other intelligent guy in our high school had a crush on my friend Tina. She was pretty and mature and perpetually tan. Her parents were also very lax and I feel like we had a few parties in her condo that included beer. Yes, yes, it was at one of her parties that I "cheated" on one of my high school boyfriends (the tennis player with halitosis) by kissing this other guy. The bf found out and it was highly dramatic and I remember my friend Wallis was REALLY disappointed in me for kissing another guy (we later became the inspiration for the show Dawson's Creek)--oh, no, wait, that was a different guy. Yes, once I kissed a boy who built the set for our summer musical (not Best Little Whorehouse in Texas as some might think) and he was one of those shadow people in high school. Like, I'd never seen him before ever and I think he smoked cigarettes and he was kind of poor and probably lived in a shady house on the other side of the tracks, but he was also quiet and sweet. We kissed on the back of a pick-up truck. I can't remember who I was dating at the time, but Wallis gave me quite a talking to!

Anyway, hearing from Adam reminded me of a couple of things from high school--like how we had a student teacher for English once and he was this cute, curly haired guy, probably no older than 22 or 23. Jen and I used to sneak in to class earlier and set this little alarm clock forward a few minutes so we could get out early. I believe that we also tried to make the alarm go off during class, but I don't know if that ever worked. We also wrote him fake love notes and left them where he would find them during our class so we could see the expression on his face. I can't recall what exactly we wrote, but I know I made the penmanship purposefully sloppy and wrote something like, "Sorry for the handwriting. I'm writing this on the bus." We possibly included a few badly written poems. For another project, we created this fake human sized mannequin doll called Heather, dressed her in school colors and took pictures of her with everyone around the school for some slide show presentation. One of the photos was her with the principal and the voice over was like, You can't tell in this picture b/c he's behind his desk, but Principal Druthers is wearing knickers. Then we would drive around with with one of Heather's arms hanging out of the trunk. We thought we were the funniest people in the world.

I remember nothing academically about hs. I remember mostly the boys and being in drama club and in student council and some advance placement classes and having an English teacher named Mrs. Bytheway and a geography teacher named Mrs. Gustafason (this might have been in middle school). Most of the time in her class, we colored maps with colored pencils. The only thing I remember from her is the Tigris-Euphrates river. Nothing in particular about it--just the name. For my science project one year, I made dolls of all of the Greek gods. Twelve dolls with faces drawn on in marker and traditional garb. Where was the research in that? I hated science and math and geography because it didn't have much meaning to me, except for maybe biology. But anything that had to do with numbers or formulas caused me to automatically become stupid.