I Was a Kid Once

When I was a kindergartner, I went to a private Christian school in Koreatown, called “Pilgrim.”  Strangely, I currently work four block away from this building of nostalgia and terror.  

A little background:  I never had enough to eat in my packed lunches, but I was too shy to tell my dad.  Instead, I became what other kids called a “Beggar.”  Nerds candies were sold at the student store, and as a big handful of Nerds is bound to spill over a little, I picked up the extras from the ground:  I actually roamed the blacktop looking for stray Nerds to eat.  I also regularly snuck into the classroom at recess and lunch, to steal, mostly food, but also some decorative erasers and such. 

Also, for the most part, my few friends were boys, because I was always like “Look at my underwear!” all the time, and what boy in their right mind is going to be like “I want to avoid being friends with the girl who  shows me her underwear.” 

To recap, I was hungry, sneaky and harmlessly pre-promiscuous. 

Perhaps this is besides the point.  I’m really here today to discuss my love of annotating my yearbook. 

I liked to put frowny faces or mean comments next to people who I didn’t like.  Sometimes, if it was a picture of a friend or acquaintance, I’d be all, “I Know Her!”  Also, I was pretty evenly bisexual at the time (being in actuality pre-sexual, but with crushes), so there are a lot of hearts drawn around boys’ AND girls’ photos.   

I’m guessing that some of you share some of my experiences and preferences from this age, or at least the habit of editorializing.

Without further ado:

 

I don't know if you can see the heart I drew around the face of the blonde cheerleader in the middle of the page.  I had a crush on her -- my god, just look at her .... the perfect blend of new wave and pep-squad style ... but I also really appreciated her protection of me.  I was by far and away the most unpopular Kindergartener and 1st grader (I left this christian shit-hole in the dust after 2 years).  This cheerleader must have had a sister in my class or something (the school was K through 12) because she came to our playground sometimes, and was a gracious young woman who went out of her way to treat me well.            

            

close up

 

Well, if I weren't the kind of lonesome kid who ate Nerds off the ground, I would have ended this post on a high note, with the anecdote about the Saint Theresa-like cheerleader.  But I am a lonesome kid.  Was, am, always will be.  

So I leave you with this photo of some little assholes with very much warranted frowny faces drawn next to their photos.  And in case you can't quite see, here is a close up of these snobby ne'er do wells:

Let's hope you little terrors have learned a little noblesse oblige.

Earthquakes Music Video

When I was a morose and pained teenager (as teenagers are), I was in a feminist punk band called Foxfire.  It was a pretty big part of my existence.  

Tamra Lucid  from the band Lucid Nation (our guardian angels who were always letting us share their equipment and promoting us through word of mouth) just finished emailing me a few mp3's she'd been able to create from one of our old cassettes (pardon any incorrect tech verbiage here).  My song "Earthquakes" was my favorite one to sing at shows.  Pretty much everything I had to get off my chest:  feeling ugly, not being taken seriously as a girl, being victim to a violent crime that left me jumpy to things like earthquakes -- it was all in that song.  

Foxfire was a three girl band:  me, Rhani Lee Remedes and Andrea Branca.  We all switched around on which instruments we played for each song; Earthquakes is Andrea on bass, Rhani on guitar and me on vocals.  I literally just figured out the Movie Maker software last night just to throw this video together, and it is really just a bunch of photos I had saved on my computer, but they are photos that are special to me.

A Few pre-motherhood Halloweens

The Four Tops, singing "Duke of Earl"

The Los Angeles version of Autumn is here – a crispness in the air for a few hours on Saturday morning, before the temperature hit the eighties again.  Even when I was a little kid, that kind of autumn quality of air made me feel wistful for my youth.  The annual Halloween nights of trick-or-treating made me feel like a kid in a movie about trick-or-treating, because how could real life be so almost melodramatically, so theatrically childlike.  These annual Halloween nights usually turned out a little disastrous, with a mom in her cups who loved Halloween too much not to feel compelled to ruin it, to make it less fun and therefore more bearable.  I also got sick at least a few Halloweens of my life. 

One Halloween, a close friend of mom’s, who used to be her room mate, sleeping on that old fashioned contrivance the Murphy Bed, made me a princess costume by hand, tracing a t-shirt and skirt of mine as a pattern for a silk and lace outfit.  Instead of feeling flattered that he’d gone to so much trouble, I was irritated that it looked too much like a regular outfit.  This was in second or third grade, two of the more miserable years of unpopularity in a childhood vacillating wildly between years of popularity and unpopularity.  I’d wanted to wow the school with some beautiful Elizabethan gown I’d imagined he’d make, and instead of telling everyone I was a princess, I ended up saying I was Madonna.

Probably my worst Halloween was in sixth grade, when I decided to go to an after school Halloween dance, dressed up as a cat in an elaborate, ugly cat headdress supposed to look like the costumes in the musical Cats.  My white pancake make up was all smeary and gross.  Sixth grade was even worse than Third grade, and made some of what people refer to as “bullying” now sound like a day at the beach.  I always engaged in extracurricular activities like cheerleading, school dances and talent shows because I thought I could win people over.  Seriously no one danced with me at the dance.  The last song was “Duke of Earl,” and even though it was a song from decades ago it sounded to me like a love song of some immediacy and it hurt to have no one to dance with.

My first year at college, I didn’t feel like doing anything on Halloween because I didn’t want to end up disappointed, but there was a big party at one of the punk houses, and one of my closest friends convinced me to go with her and our other best friend, telling me she’d make sure we had a great night.  At the time, I wasn’t entirely tuned in yet to the aesthetic do’s and don’ts of the mods, rockers and mockers I wanted to impress, and I still had a love of whimsy, which included knowing all the different types of fairies; I'd deciding that I would be a bewitching girl if I dressed up like a dryad (a wood nymph).  My friend helped me bobby pin leaves in my hair, and I wore a brown dress that I thought looked like the slinky trunk of a sexy, skinny and slightly drunk tree.  I was always on the make at parties at this time in my life.  I always wanted it to be the night I'd fall in love with someone new, but especially on unattached holidays (and especially on New Year's Eve, Halloween or Fourth of July).  My first ex-boyfriend’s band was playing at the party and I imagined him giving me meaningful looks but the only time he looked at me it was with this unfounded aggression he’d developed.  I flirted systematically with everyone in the bathroom line.  Once finally in the bathroom, I got one of my temporary fits of panic over the fact that the toilet was in such horrible shape and there was no toilet paper.  I hadn’t led a sheltered life of all bathrooms being functional, and in fact was used to my mom’s bathroom where the pretty knick knacks piled on top of the tank made it hard to remove the lid of the tank and tinker around with the moving part when the flusher stopped working.  Also, mom and I used the same two Star Wars toothbrushes for at least nine years, liking how cute they were and not knowing any better.  Despite, or because of, having made my peace with bad bathrooms, I always loved the sanctuary of a nice and functional bathroom.  Now that I was a young woman, and I went to a lot of parties and shows at ramshackle venues, I was forever finding myself in a bad bathroom with a toilet that didn’t really work.  I could never shit on nights out, with all the bad toilets everywhere, even if I got a horrible stomach ache – I’d just be stranded somewhere, surreptitiously sneaking an Immodium AD from my pocket.  This untended plumbing emergency was the last straw of another disappointing Halloween.

Pete & Pete, "Halloweenie" episode

6th grade yearbook coverage of the Halloween dance.  Me as the white cat (middle right).