2000-08-07

Dada Fred

Every few months or so, I get completely floored by overwhelming nostalgia for my high school daze. I couldn't even begin to tell you why; they weren't at all what I'd call the "best days of my life," but neither were they so awful as to be psychologically-damaging (that was junior high school). I'll usually spend up to a full week listening to Crowded House, INXS and the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, sculpting my hair into intricate mid-80's pompadours with my private stash of hard-to-find colored mousse and mentally replaying every mortifying classroom scene from September of 1984 to June of 1988 until Kev finds me sprawled on the living room carpet, one arm flung across my mousse-tinted forehead, uttering vague mumblings of welcome to Utter Oblivion�.

It's really awful.

This weekend I found myself in that terrible, nebulous region of the brain called "What If?" It's always been an interesting place to visit, and I can spend hours there just mercilessly flagellating myself over the tiniest five-second bits of my past, agonizing over missed smarmy comeback opportunities and such. This weekend I was able to arrange a unique and tantalizingly delusional marriage between "What If?" and the aforementioned Irrational High School Nostalgia. The resulting spawn of this union was nothing so pedestrian as a fantasy Portrait of the Writer as Homecoming Queen, not at all. I just got to thinking about how things might have been a bit better for me had I taken Advanced Placement English.

Let the record show that I barely graduated high school, with a pitiful class ranking somewhere in the bottom third and a combined SAT score just barely skimming the quadruple digits. It's not that I was a stupid kid; I was just lazy and possessed of a comprehensive and well-bound set of all the wrong priorities. I had a nice vocabulary on me, though, and in all fairness I genuinely enjoyed everything my English teachers gave me to read, so much so that my 11th grade teacher sat me down towards the end of that year and offered me the chance to test for the A.P. English class he'd be teaching in the fall. He felt sure that I could handle the workload, but the question was whether or not I would handle it, famous as I was then for completely blowing shit off until the last possible second.

I turned it down, spending my senior year in regular ol' English for the Possibly College-Bound, where I continued to blow shit off with the precision and regularity of Swiss clockwork.

Where is this leading? Well, to this day I regret not taking the A.P. class, not because of what was offered on the reading list (I eventually got around to reading all of it, even Vanity Fair, by the time I finished graduate school), but because of some of the truly insane kids who were in that class.

Fred had somehow learned about Dadaism somewhere along the line, and thus embarked on a one-man mission to revive it within the halls of Hingham High School. Nonsensical rants would appear on blackboards, usually followed by a series of comments from the other A.P. kids: "Fred - Dada is dead; get a real fuckin' art form."

Fred's obsession with Dadaism culminated in a performance at the talent show that spring, in which he and my friend Dex shouted at each other and threw flour all over themselves until they were summarily booed off the stage.

I was in awe, and more than a little jealous. My freakiness was purely external, in that I wore my mother's old housedresses to school. Fred, on the other hand, looked like everybody else but had managed to freak everybody out just by being Fred. I still wonder if Fred and I would've been friends had I just sucked up and taken A.P. English.

lisamcc at 15:55:06

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