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Day 305: My favorite grade
I think my favorite grade was 12th, Senior Year. It was either 8th grade, Junior Year, or Senior Year. So I'll go with Senior Year this time, though I could make an argument for any of those three years.
In my last year of high school, I took four AP classes -- English, European History, French, and Biology. I'd taken US History AP the year before. Those classes were wonderful; they really pushed me and I liked being pushed. I have to admit it was also good having kids who were also really into learning in the classes, though since Evanston Township High School was definitely tracked, I'd had that in most of my classes. Some of the students were annoying rich kids who looked well down their noses at regular kids. But a lot weren't obnoxious in that way. Suddenly I don't remember whether I was in YAMO Senior Year, or Junior Year... no, it was Senior Year. Junior Year, I was in the chorus in The Mikado, which was great fun.
YAMO was a student written, composed, choreographed, and directed play or series of skits, produced every year by a very talented bunch of drama students. No one really knew what YAMO stood for. Some kids said it originated in the 1950s and was an acronym for "Youth of America Marching Onward". Others argued for something else, but I don't even remember other suggestions. It was just the yearly Senior Show. My Senior Year happened to be the ... now I am not sure.. the centenary of the high school? Some of the building was from the 1920s, though, so maybe it was just the 60th anniversary of the high school's central core building. John Cusack and Steve Pink and Leelai Demos and Scott Markus, I think -- anyway a crew of John Cusack and his friends conceived of the general outline and wrote it, composed the music, choreographed the dances, and directed it. It began with a steal from 2001, A Space Odyssey, with a monolith inscribed ETHS rising from the stage floor, and the chorus, as cavemen, cowering before it. That's what I remember the most. That, and being overexcited during one rehearsal such that Cusack came over and patted my head, telling me to shut up or pipe down, or something.
Senior Year -- this part is not so great -- was also when I got first bronchitis, then what the doctors called pleurisy (which when I read about it seemed like something left over from the 19th century, and I felt lucky not to have "consumption", e.g. tuberculosis), cracked a rib coughing, and then got viral pneumonia to top it all off. Altogether I was out of school for about three months of my Senior Year, and no one thought I'd be able to make up the work and graduate, or pass my AP tests. I had to take gym three times a day -- at 6 AM, then during the school day at my regular period, and then again after school at 3:30 -- but I fucking made it through, and got 5s on all four AP tests.
The "progressive" political club I'd founded my Sophomore Year was still going strong, and we had plenty of good actions and went to many demonstrations.
I enjoyed the friends I was hanging out with a lot, much parental liquor was consumed (at one friend's house, often repaired to because her parents were gone a lot of the time, we had seemingly inexhaustible supplies of a) vodka (which I now loathe), b) frozen orange juice, and c) velveeta cheese and wonder bread, which became grilled cheese sandwiches... her house was also decorated primarily in orange, from the shag carpeting to the ceramic lamps, to the modernistish murky oil paintings in gilded frames), some weed was smoked, though I was never very good at that, and enjoyable debates and arguments were had.
And then, at the end of the year, I was selected with a few other kids from my French AP class, as I had been selected each year, to take the Alliance Française Concours National de Français. Each year previously I'd done well, and the prize was a French dictionary, or a copy of a French novel. I thought it was the same this year, but no. For Seniors, the prize was an all-expenses paid scholarship to Paris to study at the Alliance Française on Boulevard Raspail. I did not know that, but I was informed, on my birthday, that I had won, from my school. Two girls from New Trier were the other winners. We had to pass an interview, at which I remember raving about how much I loved Voltaire, which I did. And then the current scions of the McCormack family gave me round trip air tickets to Paris, prepaid hostel lodgings on the Ile St. Louis at the Foyer la Vigie, run by severe nuns, and $1,000 spending money. Holy shit. I had never even been on a plane. The whole thing was insane, and wonderful.
In my last year of high school, I took four AP classes -- English, European History, French, and Biology. I'd taken US History AP the year before. Those classes were wonderful; they really pushed me and I liked being pushed. I have to admit it was also good having kids who were also really into learning in the classes, though since Evanston Township High School was definitely tracked, I'd had that in most of my classes. Some of the students were annoying rich kids who looked well down their noses at regular kids. But a lot weren't obnoxious in that way. Suddenly I don't remember whether I was in YAMO Senior Year, or Junior Year... no, it was Senior Year. Junior Year, I was in the chorus in The Mikado, which was great fun.
YAMO was a student written, composed, choreographed, and directed play or series of skits, produced every year by a very talented bunch of drama students. No one really knew what YAMO stood for. Some kids said it originated in the 1950s and was an acronym for "Youth of America Marching Onward". Others argued for something else, but I don't even remember other suggestions. It was just the yearly Senior Show. My Senior Year happened to be the ... now I am not sure.. the centenary of the high school? Some of the building was from the 1920s, though, so maybe it was just the 60th anniversary of the high school's central core building. John Cusack and Steve Pink and Leelai Demos and Scott Markus, I think -- anyway a crew of John Cusack and his friends conceived of the general outline and wrote it, composed the music, choreographed the dances, and directed it. It began with a steal from 2001, A Space Odyssey, with a monolith inscribed ETHS rising from the stage floor, and the chorus, as cavemen, cowering before it. That's what I remember the most. That, and being overexcited during one rehearsal such that Cusack came over and patted my head, telling me to shut up or pipe down, or something.
Senior Year -- this part is not so great -- was also when I got first bronchitis, then what the doctors called pleurisy (which when I read about it seemed like something left over from the 19th century, and I felt lucky not to have "consumption", e.g. tuberculosis), cracked a rib coughing, and then got viral pneumonia to top it all off. Altogether I was out of school for about three months of my Senior Year, and no one thought I'd be able to make up the work and graduate, or pass my AP tests. I had to take gym three times a day -- at 6 AM, then during the school day at my regular period, and then again after school at 3:30 -- but I fucking made it through, and got 5s on all four AP tests.
The "progressive" political club I'd founded my Sophomore Year was still going strong, and we had plenty of good actions and went to many demonstrations.
I enjoyed the friends I was hanging out with a lot, much parental liquor was consumed (at one friend's house, often repaired to because her parents were gone a lot of the time, we had seemingly inexhaustible supplies of a) vodka (which I now loathe), b) frozen orange juice, and c) velveeta cheese and wonder bread, which became grilled cheese sandwiches... her house was also decorated primarily in orange, from the shag carpeting to the ceramic lamps, to the modernistish murky oil paintings in gilded frames), some weed was smoked, though I was never very good at that, and enjoyable debates and arguments were had.
And then, at the end of the year, I was selected with a few other kids from my French AP class, as I had been selected each year, to take the Alliance Française Concours National de Français. Each year previously I'd done well, and the prize was a French dictionary, or a copy of a French novel. I thought it was the same this year, but no. For Seniors, the prize was an all-expenses paid scholarship to Paris to study at the Alliance Française on Boulevard Raspail. I did not know that, but I was informed, on my birthday, that I had won, from my school. Two girls from New Trier were the other winners. We had to pass an interview, at which I remember raving about how much I loved Voltaire, which I did. And then the current scions of the McCormack family gave me round trip air tickets to Paris, prepaid hostel lodgings on the Ile St. Louis at the Foyer la Vigie, run by severe nuns, and $1,000 spending money. Holy shit. I had never even been on a plane. The whole thing was insane, and wonderful.