(Image from Whispers of Healing Oracle)
My stepson is starting high school on Wednesday. While I have some of the normal concerns and worries I’m sure he’s going to be fine. (I’m also sure it’s going to be challenging and that he will struggle to give a shit about his school work. That’s okay too.) More than worrying about him I am finding myself going down memory lane and remembering what high school was like for me.
I grew up in Berkeley California and went to Berkeley High which is the only public high school in the city. So my graduating class has 750 people in it. And those are just the kids who graduated. At Berkeley High it was equally easy to get a really good education or to get totally lost in the shuffle. There was for sure a shortage of handholding or coddling. Personally I don’t think that was necessarily a bad thing. While I agree with the sentiment that the world being a hard place does not mean we should be harder on our children to prepare them. We should be kinder so they feel like at the very least they have a refuge at home. At the same time I believe that children are much smarter and more capable than a lot of people give them credit for. On the flip side, I wish I knew as much as I though I did when I was 15.
I will also admit that due to the lack of supervision at the high school I spent most of my high school years pretty stoned. I sometimes wonder if my life would have turned out any different if I hadn’t been. I mean… even stoned I graduated high school with a 3.97 overall gpa. (I find it a little awkward that I still know my high school gpa. I have two college degrees and I have no clue what my graduating gpa was at either school. I’m pretty sure it was lower than 3.97.)) Since we can’t go back in time (yet) I can never know how things would have been different. Maybe I was using weed to self medicate my social anxiety and if I weren’t stoned I would have struggled more.
One of my most vivid memories of high school was my senior prom (it’s like a bad high school movie already!) but my prom was nothing like I had ever seen in a movie. Maybe it would be the closest to the prom seen in Saved. I went with a group of four people. My official date was a young man from a gay support group that I went to. He was maybe 18 and when his dad found out he was gay he got kicked out of the house so he never got to go to his own prom. He wore a white wedding dress and a hot pink wig and I picked him up from his sisters house and brough a corsage. The third person in our group was is a trans woman who I have lost touch with who was not yet out as trans. But because of the group she was able to feel comfortable wearing a dress to prom. The final member of our group was someone I did not know very well. Try to follow this high school six degrees of Kevin Bacon nonsense. He dated my ex-girlfriend after we broke up, she dumped him right before prom for a good friend of his, and the only other ride he could get to prom at that point was with them. So as I used to tell the story I went to prom with two boys in dresses (one of whom is a women but had not made that known yet) and a guy in a blue plaid suit with a gold belt buckle that said STU. Sufficed to say no one noticed the dress I spent ages hand making and beading. Oh! Right! Technically there was a fifth member of our group. But when we went to pick her up she had a friend she wanted to bring along a friend who did not have a ticket. I told her I didn’t think that would work and prom was at a hotel in San Francisco so I was not going to turn around and take them back if she couldn’t get in. True to my prediction she could not get in and the two of them decided to go hang out at a park and drink.
We were all (if you hadn’t guessed from the description thus far) social outcasts in our own way. I decided to go to my prom because I was worried I would regret it if I didn’t go but not out of any actual desire to be there. I figured it would be easier to go and not regret it than to not go and always wonder. I remember very little of the event itself. But I remember we got a really good dinner at a fancy Japanese restaurant in Berkeley. I remember it was one of the first times I drove across the Bay Bride on my own. At prom my male best friends ex-girlfriend cornered me and was crying on my shoulder because they had broken up and he was there with another girl. I think we danced to one song.
After we left we reconnected with the two now intoxicated girls. They wanted to keep going all night but we were all annoyed with them so I made up an excuse about needing to get my dad’s van back to him. Relevant fact, I learned how to drive in my dads full size work van. When I took my driving test the first thing the person giving me the test asked was “have you driven this before?” For prom my dad had put in a temporary bench seat so there would be enough room for everyone. Another fun fact about full size work vans is that not all parking garages have a high enough clearance for them so we could not park at the hotel where prom was, we had to find another garage and walk. So the two drunk girls decided they wanted to ride in the back back of the van behind the bench seat. When we were driving across the bridge everyone in the car got quiet and the two people on the bench seat had odd looks on their faces when I checked the rearview mirror. When we dropped the girls off we found out why. Apparently the two girls were having sex in the back of the van the whole way back to Berkeley. They were the only ones in our group that got laid that night.
After we got rid of them we went down to The Berkeley Marina and walked all the way to the end of the pier in our prom finery. If we had all had smart phones there would be many photos. It was a beautiful foggy night and it was late and we were out on our own. I remember having a conversation standing at the end of the pier about how the proms in movies are nothing like the night we had and that our night would make a way better movie.
So, any Hollywood directors reading this, give me a call. I hear there are so many teen movies because they make money, lets make another one!
Screaming in the Dark 