Dawg day afternoon

We interrupt this introspective and moderately cringey travelogue to bring you a glimpse of today's festivities: namely, the triumphant return of the Bulldogs to a spectacularly renovated Garfield High School.




It's hard to describe the experience of wandering around, inside a building whose shell and staircases were familiar, but whose interior was foreign, slickly modernized. Garfield: tasteful and contemporary and as shiny clean as it is ever, ever going to be again. This is not your father's Oldsmobile. I ducked into one of the girls' bathrooms, expressly to see the spotless tile, the amazing toilets that actually flushed. I can remember girls crying, in those bathrooms, and smoking, and trying on prom dresses my friend Gwyn capably sewed herself...but actually using the facilities in the manner in which they were intended was a calculated risk. If you could, you held it.

Anyway. I bumped into my 11th-grade English teacher, Ann Schuh, who insisted that she remembered me and in fact had thought of me just the other day. "What on earth for?" I asked her helplessly. Of course it's possible that she proceeded on down the hall saying that to every single person who exclaimed at the sight of her, but in the moment I allowed myself a tiny glow. Ms. Schuh, if she ever Googles herself, perhaps will see this, and so here are two stories for her:

• On one of my essays, she once scribbled a comment claiming that she expected better than "this Holden Caulfield whining" from me. I hadn't read Catcher in the Rye at the time and so this meant little to me, though whining ensured that I caught the gist of it, gee thanks. A year or two later, when I actually read the book, I was happy to take it as a stupefying compliment: she was comparing me to Salinger!


• Every year Ms. Schuh chaperoned a group of students to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival in Oregon. I did not go. But I remember that the boy I pined and longed and humiliated myself for did...AND he secured special permission and another spot in the group for his girlfriend, who didn't even attend Garfield. OH. THE. AGONY, of sitting in her class aware that the mumbly metalhead of my dreams was about to set off for a romantic weekend of theatre, instigated by (and, granted, under the watchful eye of) Ms. Schuh, who I adored and feared in equal measure. Did she have any inkling of her betrayal, the melodrama playing out in my pointy little head? Cripes, let's hope not. Already she is reading this and, no doubt, detecting traces of more whining.

I had to orient myself by looking out the windows, time and again; even the dimensions of the classrooms have changed. The south annex to the original building is now seamlessly connected, so I found myself walking through hallways that did not previously exist. The dank and forbidding gym has been replaced by an immense new complex, the walls spotless white and soaring overhead. A group of folks from my class stumbled across the new weight room and screamed in awe; it's nicer than the gyms most of us belong to.

Someone picked up a copy of the school paper, the Messenger's latest edition, and in it I found a hilarious article that I sincerely hope they post online eventually, about the myths and ghosts of the old building. One section deployed every possible double and triple entendre to talk about the little balconies up behind the old auditorium stage, where you could access the light grid and run backdrops up and down on cables. The speculation in the article was that more things were...erected, up there in the rigging, than mere stage sets. Ahem. To my surprise, these ribald tales had their doubters. So it falls to me to tell you that, yes, there was a distinct underground student lounge operation on the eastern balcony. A couple of cots, a red light bulb for atmosphere. The most exciting thing to happen to me up there, given that I was a pretty big dork (and the tightly-wound valedictorian) was that a couple other kids smuggled in a microwave stolen from the faculty room, and so we laid around in our little opium den making...popcorn. Other things may indeed have been made, in the Lounge, but nerdly I was not privy to them. Also, we would never in a million years have gotten away with writing such hilariously filthy punning in the school paper, so well-played, student journalists. A master stroke, you might say.

At any rate, y'all have to find a new spot to get busy:

The sexy sekrit popcorn-and-cot area? Now a grand, sweeping staircase down to the student commons and cafeteria. The underground student lounge IS NOW A LOUNGE, for reals. Hilarious and bizarre. (It would be the staircase on the left, if you're wondering. Oh, horny and otherwise maladjusted teens...where will you go now?)

Chicklegirl, who I met wandering the halls, called it Closure, what we were feeling, and I suppose that's accurate. It was Garfield, but it wasn't. It certainly wasn't the haunting Gothic brickpile of my anxiety dreams...and now that I think about it, I don't remember the last time I had one. It didn't smell right. It was a dazzling new building, plopped down inside the shell of the old one...and I was pleasantly surprised to find that comforting, instead of unsettling. "It isn't mine any more," I said aloud, with a kind of relief. It belongs to new kids, now: a dazzling new facility in which to daydream, and get takeout mashed potatoes from Ezell's, and get into melodramatic mayhem, and get their hearts broken and mended, and maybe just possibly sneak a little education into their brains around the edges. Good times, good riddance, good luck.

Give it up for your mascot

Apologies in advance for the marathon length of this post. Apologies also to Seattlest's Seth, should he turn up; I'm scared that the last paragraph might break his heart.

‘Tis the season, so last night I met up with Mike and Roger for our annual appreciation of nutritionally unsound food, followed by local high-school basketball. Because my alma mater, Garfield, is undergoing renovations, Garfield is currently housed well north of its roots, in the former Lincoln High School building in the more…affluent-white-liberal Wallingford neighborhood.

A word about Lincoln, first: that’s where my mom went, class of 1965. She was part of a truly gigantic baby-boom onslaught; there were over a thousand kids in her class alone. When I was growing up, she vividly remembered and described her high-school experience, and her yearbooks were kept in a basket of various oversized volumes in our living room. I used to pull these out and pore over them as a kid, flat on the floor, breathing in their musty black-and-white smell and trying to decipher the different looped or craggy handwriting. I studied them as if they were guidebooks; in hindsight, I probably knew those yearbooks better than the ones I accrued myself, years later. I remember the photos the way you do the illustrations in a beloved children’s book: the knee socks and plaid pencil skirts; the homecoming king and queen (who were forced to dress up as Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln, hilariously). The attempts at witty captions. Drivers’ ed mishaps and German exchange students. Boys in drag at a pep assembly, because boys in dresses will never not be funny.

After 30 years and tons of therapy, I’ve begun to recognize that my mom is one of those people for whom the high school years really were a golden era, “the best days of your life.” I mean, God forbid, right?...but in her stories, in the way she kept those yearbooks close at hand for decades, I have kind of sussed out that she was really happy, then. Maybe her happiest. At this juncture, that’s a distressing thought, however little I can do about it. I do remember being both relieved and disappointed, in equal measure, to arrive at Garfield in 1984 and discover that it had nothing at all to do with the the world represented in those Lincoln Totems.

So. Garfield vs. Woodinville, a suburban school, at Garfield’s temporary “home.” As it upgrades its sometimes nearly century-old high school buildings, Seattle’s been cycling multiple schools through the Lincoln facility for multi-year stints. Lincoln itself closed in 1982 and was allowed to languish for at least a decade before getting its own marginal improvements to serve as a staging area. Thus, the gym is assertively neutral; there are no logos on the floor, and Garfield’s various league and state title banners must be safely in storage. The grimy acoustic panels behind the baskets are painted an institutional blue, officially no one’s color. The temporary pads on the walls are purple, and the big bulldog-head sign I remember is bolted to the wall in an awkward corner, but that’s about it.

The bleachers, surprisingly, are new: molded plastic-and-metal affairs that are solid, so that you can’t drop your change or your jacket down there, or make out underneath, or hang around attempting to look up someone’s skirt. Roger noted with approval the pre-molded ass curve that ran the length of each seating panel, and I have to concur: the classic wooden bleachers were aesthetically charming but meant crippling disfigurement to the over-30 set. We made it through the last quarter of the girls’ showdown and the whole boys’ game last night, and I didn’t need a cervical collar to get up, so that’s good.

We were expecting a Garfield blowout, and surprised not to get it: the first three quarters were a tense scramble, Garfield particularly struggling to penetrate the snarl of Woodinville defenders anywhere near the hoop. Despite the close game, however, I found myself constantly distracted by the people-watching. The pep band did a hip-swaying dance in place that set the entire stands rocking gently beneath us. I singled out the girl in the band with whom I identified, with her avant-garde glasses, retro wedge haircut, and vintage plaid coat. (I wasn't her, in the 80s, but I sure wanted to be.) Her battered cardboard instrument case was dotted with stickers; during the action, she and a friend leaned their heads together over the complicated liner notes of a CD, giggling. At the half, she and several girls ran out to the concession stand and returned with pink boxes of those chalky conversation hearts, Valentine’s Day a mere month away.

At one point, the game was halted when a Woodinville player lost a contact lens in a scuffle under the basket. This moment surprised me most: several coaches and trainers, down on their knees at the end of the court, gingerly patting back and forth, one wielding a flashlight. After several minutes, one of the refs bent deeply at the waist, reaching to make the universal one-fingered *poink* of contact-lens retrieval and proudly offering her prize to the relieved kid. Spit on that and slap it back in, son, there’s a game to play! That they found the damn thing, though--intact, after all that sneakered stomping! That was frankly the most amazing thing I witnessed all night.

Garfield also has a number-one fan that I’ve seen at our previous games, a guy from the neighborhood whose name, I think, is Rick. I don’t remember Rick from my days, although it’s entirely possible he was there; Mike tells me, via his kids, that Rick has been hanging about at every game for years. Rick has haphazard teeth, and may be slightly inebriated, or delayed, or some combination of both…but Rick’s primary characteristic is that he loves Garfield basketball like nothing else on earth. He paces the sidelines; he knows all the cheers. He stands a few feet behind and adjacent to the pep-band conductor and conducts along with him, or compels the crowd to join in. Periodically, the band plays a romping traditional fight-song anthem, to which I believe there were lyrics, in the 60s—I looked them up, for some dumb yearbook assignment myself. During this number I watched Rick closely, to see if he was singing the words…but his lips showed only “ba baaa ba ba ba ba-baaa” in time with the tune. I don’t know if Rick is an alum, or just a devotee. I was happy, though, that someone had thought to bring him along to Lincoln, transplanting him to this alien neighborhood of hemp yoga wear and Thai bistros and multiple dog-sweater boutiques.

At the half, two of the Garfield cheerleaders sauntered—GHS cheerleaders all have master certification in sauntering—over to the announcer’s table and commandeered the microphone. “Okay,” announced one. “Um. Okay, um. This is— " swiveling to give a snickering glare at her classmates—“shhh! This is—shut up. Um, okay, this, uh…this is. Um. This is for Rick.” She held up a crisp new GHS t-shirt, which Rick trotted across the gym to collect, beaming. He folded it carefully under his arm before resuming his pep-conducting duties in front of our bleachers. “Was that a ceremony?” Roger leaned over to ask me, under his breath. Yes. Good enough, I think.

The announcer clearly dreamed of a career in sports radio. “High school basketball,” he reminded us periodically. “You wait ten minutes and the second half starts! The most Friday-night entertainment you can buy for six dollars, ladies and gentlemen.”

Fourth quarter—still a tight game, but Garfield was able to put a handful of points between themselves and the Falcons as the end drew nigh. One of the real reasons we’d gone to the game was to get a look at Tony Wroten, Jr., the 14-year-old freshman phenom that local media has basically been anointing as the Second Coming. The Seattlest crew essentially believes this kid can fly, so we were frustrated that Woodinville seemed to keep a tight lid on Wroten for most of the night. That reputation is a lot of pressure for someone that’s just barely been introduced to Algebra, which makes me uneasy…but nonetheless we’d all kept our eyes on him throughout. He’s 6’1”, so not huge (though he has time yet to grow). Ultimately what I noticed most is that the kid seems to have the wingspan of a hang glider. Every so often he’d reach to snag an errant pass or loose ball, and his endless arm seemed to unfurl in slow motion, fingertips juuust grazing the ball, tenderly collecting it back into his possession. It was a beauty to behold, man…but really we wanted to see some acrobatics, everyone did.

There were maybe 10 seconds on the clock in the final quarter when Wroten broke free of the pack and took off, sprinting the length of the court. You could feel it coming—I shouted “OH!” aloud, and Wroten sailed up for a monster dunk, the thing we’d been waiting for all night. He hung on the rim for a moment, then dropped—and I didn’t see exactly how he landed, but…he landed wrong. He went down, falling full-length to the hardwood, and writhed. Everybody threw their shouts into reverse, a sharp singular inhale. Silence clapped down over the gym like a bell jar. The clock froze at six seconds while a preternaturally gifted ninth-grader crabbed on the floor, pedaling air. I don’t know which one of us muttered “Jesus, did we just witness the end of a career?” Maybe all of us did. After several eternal sick-making minutes, the trainers got Wroten up and hobbling off the court—limping, but not hopping; does that bode well? A dislocated knee, a jammed ankle? I actually got up this morning and watched a few minutes of High School Sportz Blitz MegaBlast Whatever, the local highlights show, before heading off to yoga class. I’ve scanned the two daily papers, too: not a word. So maybe we didn’t see the most devastating thing ever, last night, a split second encompassing both thrill and terror, of utmost significance in the weird microcosm universe of high school. Here’s hoping.

Garfield 66, Woodinville 55.

The other day around the way

Today in my inbox, mail from Chicklegirl herself: the forwarded invitation to Garfield High School's class of 1988 reunion. Our 20th. Twentieth! [clutches at hair with both fists, exposing gray roots]

Holly and I went to our tenth, which was largely unremarkable except for the ways in which (typical of our class, I think) it was a jolly, disorganized trainwreck. Something went wrong with the bartending contract, and so the jock boys rolled up the sleeves of their dress shirts and lugged cases of beer in from the loading dock themselves. The menu included fried chicken and biscuits, which was actually entirely appropriate and welcome. The bitchiest girls were...well, still fairly bitchy, as it turns out...but now they were all, to a one, blonde. A photographer captured our memories in groups and en masse, collecting our cash and scribbled addresses, and was never heard from again--or at least, not by me. Heh.

I wasn't popular, in high school--I wasn't actively unpopular, but I didn't cut a wide swath of influence. In the larger world of Garfield, I was meek and mute, not a joiner of clubs or teams; mostly I was petrified, every waking moment, that I would commit some tactical error or grave misstep and expose some element of my secret, spastic dorkitude for public riducule. Best to say nothing! I had a small circle of close friends that I loved, that I think loved or at least very kindly, stoically tolerated me, and the ceaseless comic stylings I unleashed in their safe environment. Holly was much better known, with many more irons in the fire: swim team and debate, newspaper staff, generally far less of an uptight goob than I was. I trailed happily in her social wake for years. At the 10-year reunion, I reaped the results of this as classmate after classmate descended upon her, crying "Holly!" and sweeping her into an embrace. Then they'd inevitably turn to me and say "And...hey! Hi...you!" I'm not complaining, here, truthfully; it was genuniely funny, to watch them fumble for my name. It was a difference between us that I'd entirely forgotten about.

It wasn't a bad evening at all, that tenth reunion. People generally looked good; they were healthy and happy and gainfully employed (or in graduate school, employment's polar opposite). I enjoyed it. I smiled around at them all, and I thought: wow, I don't ever have to do this again! Not out of any resentment or regret. I bore no ill will towards anyone. I simply realized that there was a reason that I hadn't seen any of those people in a decade: because I didn't care. The handful of people I truly adored, and still wanted to be in contact with...I already was. The rest of 'em: eh. We were all okay. Good for us! Okay! Bye bye now!

So I had mixed feelings, opening that invitation this morning. There were a few people I'd been wildly curious about, who hadn't shown up at the 10th; would they bother, with the 20th? I'm thinking of the obese girl with Coke-bottle-lens glasses who signed my yearbook with a Bible verse. Some kids tormented her openly for years; I didn't, but I sure as shit didn't stand up for her either. I kept a low profile, laughed when they did. I do remember trying, on a few occasions, to coax a more vibrant personality out of her: maybe a cute nickname? maybe a sassy new haircut? That was me in a nutshell, the dopey optimist at 15--surely everything could be repaired with just the right makeover! Anyway. I had revenge fantasies on that girl's behalf. I wanted her to show up at our 10th, glamorous and obscenely wealthy, some sort of mogul. I wanted her to stalk in fabulously and tell us all to go fuck ourselves, and I would've leapt up and applauded, absolved of some of my guilt at snickering behind her back in the cacophony of the hallways, years before. But she didn't show.

Twenty years. Is there anything I really want or need to revisit? No, I think, no and no. But nonetheless I clicked through to the event site, and was rewarded: by several of the huge-haired senior portraits other people had already posted on the Classmates page...and by the sound file playing underneath the site in a constant loop: Run-D. M. C., "You Be Illin'." Ohhhhhh, yeeeaaahhh. I laughed and laughed. That there, it's almost enough to convince me.

Walk it like a daaawwwwg

Mike has written before about his annual pilgrimage with our buddy Roger to a Garfield High School basketball game. Mike's kids were/are Bulldogs; Roger played for West Seattle High back in the day. As another GHS alum, this year I begged to go along, and they agreed to accomodate me provided I participate in the other aspect of the ritual, dinner at Ezell's across the street. This was further incentive, not a deterrent.

For reasons I can't now explain, I'd never attended a high-school basketball game, my own or any other, in my life. During my Garfield years we had something of a hoops dynasty going; both boys and girls won state titles in 1987. Mysteriously, though, I chose to attend only football games, at the grim, crumbling Memorial Stadium. Garfield did and does suck at football; I vividly recall trudging disconsolately to the car in this or that third quarter and hearing the horn and loudspeaker blare from the distant stadium: "Touchdown, Opponent's Name Here."

So. It had been close to 20 years since I'd been inside the GHS gym, scheduled to be demolished and replaced this summer: might as well get to it. We wolfed our chicken and double orders of mashed potatoes (hi, Holly!) outside, steam curling off our greasy fingers, and headed in. Prior to the excursion, I'd located my 1985 student ID card, but did not quite have the nerve to submit it for a discount. Garfield was once again playing Redmond, illustrating a race and class divide that Mike's noted in his previous entries on the topic. Mike, Roger, and I all happen to be honkies; "Redmond to the left," the ticket seller told us genially. Ouch. We climbed the bleachers on the Garfield side.

"What are you thinking?" Mike asked as we settled in.

"It is SO SMALL," I blurted. "I know everyone says that, but DAMN." I couldn't help myself. When I was 15 that gym was vast, the stands packed with hundreds of kids and the floor spacious enough for balloons and cheerleaders and the entire homecoming court on an elevated platform wrapped in crepe paper. The hell?

I couldn't get over the intimacy: kids milling in the stands, athletes whipping the b-ball around mere feet away. Since high school I've only been to professional sporting events in immense tax-loophole venues; it felt like those high-school players were going to fall into my lap at any moment. (At one point they almost did, lunging out of bounds and nearly flattening a cheerleader who let loose a magnificent scream but, admirably, held her ground.) Across the room I noticed the guidelines painted above the bleachers: ADULTS, VISITORS. I'd forgotten that: that grownups were encouraged to self-segregate into their own incomprehensible, utterly boring world. We sat on the GARFIELD STUDENTS side nonetheless.

I spent the bulk of the evening in a Things-Have-Changed reverie, the fried chicken triggering Proustian memories that conflicted with the scene below:

* The uniforms. Both boys and girls hitched up their huge voluminous shorts between every play. Likewise, no one seemed to be sporting the Jheri Curl made legendary by the star player of my generation, a kid named Kelly who was immortalized on a mural above the attendance office. (Is that still there, I wonder?)
* The (small, teeny) gym. It had a reasonably fresh coat of paint, with a cartoon bulldog logo emblazoned over the more sober G that had been shellacked onto the center court in my day.
* The cheerleaders. Their chants were largely incomprehensible, aside from a souped-up version of "Rock Steady" I was able to pick out. They did not do the "Bulldogs...are FRESH!" hip-thrusting number I most vividly recalled. Also, their pom-poms were the new little puffy kind, not the long, shaggy, swishy ones I secretly envied in the darkest corner of my teenage heart.
* My ass. I have considerably more padding than I did in my student days, but MY GOD I AM CRIPPLED after a couple hours on those hard, hard bleachers. Where is my lumbar cushion? Where is my memory foam? My lower back STILL hurts, man.
* The phones. My god, the phones! Kids in the stands called each other or snapped grainy photos; cheerleaders teleconferenced between quarters. In my day, you folded a note to the size of a pea, passed it down the row and prayed it would not be wrongly intercepted. Uphill! Both ways! In the snow! No shoes!

Anyway. I think what surprised me the most was...the kid-ness of the kids. When I was 15, I was deeply intimidated by most of my classmates, the cheerleaders not excepted. Hell, our cheerleaders were TOUGH; they could grunt out a cheer and beat your ass with a free hand. Scary. But these kids in purple pleated skirts in front of me were just...kids. The girl center whose every pass would take your head off if you weren't paying attention; the boy who took an elbow to the face and rolled on the floor, the team doctor sprinting to his side; everyone around us slouching and gossiping, getting called down out of the stands for excessive horseplay, cheering and rousing themselves for a chorus of "I'm So Glad," all of them...just kids.

That's the most elusive memory, I told Roger, leaving: what it felt like when everything MATTERED. It all mattered, so much! Who you saw, who you sat by, would you win, all of it thrilling and devastating and excruciatingly significant. The ADULTS were over there in their own section of the bleachers like a distant planet, and by god, EVERYTHING MATTERED.

We! Are! Together We Are! Together We Are the Mighty Bulldogs!

Okay, yeah. Dork. Point taken.

On "pep"

Two things have prompted this post: one, Darcy's daughter, Babs, starting middle school last week. (She's attending Hamilton, a classic brick pile that, as luck would have it, my mom likewise attended some years past. I told Babs this, to which she exclaimed "God, how old IS it?" which of course I immediately repeated to Mom with some amusement. Heh.) And two, over Labor Day weekend, finding and sorting through a random sack of old photos I'd taken, with my first crappy Kodak DISC camera, during my own middle-school years.

This was the early 80s, so sartorial and tonsorial missteps abound; apparently I once owned a Pac-Man t-shirt. However, my greasy hair stubbornly resisted all my attempts to reset it into the feathered helmet only the salon professional could achieve. I blithely chucked the worst examples, the pictures of classmates I no longer recognized and step-relations I no longer cared to. But the essence of "junior high" has lingered in my mind, this week.

I remember not liking the building--finding its sterile, bureaucratic 1960s architecture dumpy, after the comparatively new charms of my then-modern, modular, colorful elementary school. And I had fears: of changing for gym; of the complexities of combination locks; of the multitude of little thugs and thugettes who picked on me. (And in hindsight, I wonder: how many of my tormentors are dead? Jailed? Parents of kids older now than we were then? I feel a lot of pity, now, for kids who petrified me at the time.)

I loved things, too, though: changing classes, a stack of excitingly varied textbooks. It was like a dry run at High School, at teenhood. In sixth grade, I began to give a shit about fashion, about my cherished lavender "Mr. Rags" pullover hoodie and the right novelty laces to put through my (absolutely REQUIRED) Nikes. I discovered nail polish. I met Holly.

I had yet to be a cynic. So I was invested in school antics; I roller-skated in the gym and made mocking song dedications of syrupy pop hits ("The Girl is Mine," anyone?), on Activity Days. I also remember standing around in cafeteria dances, while two or three of the boldest kids breakdanced--ha! I'd dress up for thematic spirit days, in sixth grade; I remember sporting a huge purple clown wig, even, for one "school colors" event.

The pictures show some of this: me and my pals, clowning and shrieking in the cafeteria, basic anarchic horseplay on the days when this or that teacher (or all of them) gave up for an hour. There was a set of pics from "Fifties Day"--girls in poodle skirts and saddle shoes, chiffon scarves drooping around our ponytails. I remember well: I didn't have a skirt. So I cuffed my jeans, over bobby sox and Keds, wore a men's white shirt and the obligatory ponytail...and a set of Beatle buttons. I claimed I was "ahead of my time." I remember this so well; I truly thought I was clever, not to mention hot shit. There was a by-homeroom contest for best outfit, and I thought I was IT...and of course lost out to blonde, tiny, popular Marci Cook, who had a perfect poodle skirt, pearls, a matching cardigan, like some freaking Teen Angel. An important lesson learned, actually: for the next seven years, the Marci Cooks are going to win, every single time. Hang in there, little brainiac nerd-girl, "ahead of your time." It gets a lot better, in 20 years.

So. By high school, I'd learned this lesson enough times that I didn't care; I read books during pep assemblies, deliberately, MEANINGFULLY bored, or skipped out of them when I could. Spirit was LLLAAAAAAAAME and I was counting the days.

But I still do remember that first pep assembly, the lone annual one they treated us to in middle school, back when district budget cuts meant we didn't even have sports teams to root for. In sixth grade, I didn't know that they had the EXACT SAME assembly every year...and so I was thrilled, stunned, amazed--jumping around in the stands, probably wearing my purple wig--and I was purely AWESTRUCK when the multiple double-doors on the south side of the gym burst open, and the Garfield High marching band and cheerleaders from up the street came pouring in. This--THIS!--was what teenagers did; THIS was how it was going to be! The band seemed glamourous to me in their purple uniforms, white plastic spats and feathered toques. They played "Tequila," which I'd never heard; I had to catch up with my savvier classmates, shrieking the one-word refrain (did I know what tequila WAS? so very sheltered). The cheerleaders led us in the "two bits" cheer, and for that moment I was utterly invested.

I really like her, now, that funny, dorky little girl, that 11-year-old naif; it's taken me a long time to get back to her, back to the point where I run around in a flowered wool hat the minute it's cold enough; where I have more Halloween and Christmas decorations than a grown person should; where there is in fact room in my life for both the eye-rolling cynic and the besotted, giddy fangirl. I feel very generous towards her, lately--towards me and all my selves, jockeying for position in front of a cheap camera and in my expansive life. Check me out--I contain multitudes.