Frank Zappa

I walked up to the front of the classroom and reached into one of the two boxes lying on the teacher’s desk. I pulled out a folded piece of paper, then reached into the other box and extracted another up piece of paper from that one. I unfolded the first one, the one from the boy’s box, and read it. How to Build a Birdhouse. I unfolded the girl’s piece of paper. The First Time I Rode an Elephant. I stared down at the two pieces of paper and sighed. I had to get the hell out of here.

I was in my first week of classes of my ninth grade year at the Traverse City Junior High School. The junior high went through ninth grade and then everybody switched to the senior high for the last three years of mandatory schooling, and my plan was to go to Interlochen at that point. I figured I’d ride out the junior high with my friends and see it to its conclusion and we’d part ways. But looking down at those two pieces of paper, I knew I wasn’t going to make it.

I was in Public Speaking, and I was supposed to give an impromptu speech based on one of the topics I had pulled out of the boxes. One of the boxes was supposed to be things boys knew more about and the other was supposed to be slanted in favor of girls, but I knew nothing about building birdhouses and I’d certainly never ridden an elephant (and what fourteen-year-old girl had?). I mumbled something about cutting six pieces of plywood to make a rectangular cube and drilling a large circular hole in one of them and gluing them together and, voila, a birdhouse. The teacher nodded and I took my seat. This had to be the lamest class in the entire junior high, and that was saying a lot.

We had started the class by taking seats in alphabetical order. Then, as a way to “get to know each other”, each of us stood up in order and said our name and something we liked that had the same initials as our name. Then the next person had to stand up and say what the name of everybody else before them was and what they liked and add their name and like to the list. And we weren’t allowed to write anything down, we had to do it from memory. I had it easy, being near the front of the alphabet, and I could remember that Bobby Aardark liked blowing antelope and Donna Dingleberry like Dunkin’ Donuts (I liked chocolate éclairs), but I felt sorry for Todd Webber, who once again got screwed because his last name happened to be at the end of the alphabet. Only Marvelous Marvin the Mnemonician could remember the names of all 28 people and what they liked without writing anything down, so Todd did what he could, failed, and got a mark against him – put, no doubt, on his infamous permanent record. He also got busted during the impromptu speech exercise because he pulled “playing baseball” out of the boy’s box and joked that there were two ways to do that and got sent to the office for his gentle innuendo. Poor Todd Webber, he really didn’t have a chance.

Public Speaking was the straw that broke this camel’s back, but the ton of bricks that preceded it was A Chorus Line, which I had gone to see in Seattle just before returning to Michigan for school that year. It struck such a deep chord in me – that longing to be someone, that desire to perform, to create, to rise above the faceless sea of humanity, hit me so hard that I burst into tears after the show. There’s more to life than what I was forced to do at the lousy junior high, and there was more to me than I’d ever be able to develop there. I was invisible, which was the preferred state in junior high where, like in Japan, the saying was “the nail that sticks out gets the hammer”. But I didn’t want to be invisible anymore. I wanted to be seen, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be seen surrounded by 850 ninth graders, making up a speech about riding an elephant and sharing my deepest desire to eat a chocolate éclair.

So, despondent, I begged my mom to let me go to Interlochen for my freshman year. It was a scramble to get all the paperwork in, but she pulled some strings and three weeks later, I was in my first classes at the Academy, excited to be on my way to bigger and better things. There was an awkward adjustment period, but I expected as much so I put my head down and tried to run through it. But the awkward adjustment period lasted the entire year. And into the next year too. Finally, in the spring of my sophomore year, I had to admit that I was miserable.

The problem wasn’t the Academy. I liked the work. I liked most of my teachers. I enjoyed getting the chance to explore my creative side with acting classes and photography classes and dance classes. I enjoyed being challenged by the academics, which were much more rigorous and interesting than anything I had experienced before. That was all good. The problem was that I didn’t have any friends. And I wasn’t going to get any because I was a day student. Interlochen is a boarding school and 99% of the students lived in the dorms. There were a very few local kids, mostly faculty brats, that lived close enough to the campus that they could walk there in the morning and walk home after the last class finished in the evening. But in a boarding school, friendships aren’t made in class or at lunch, they’re made in the dorm. That’s where the real bonding took place. While everybody else had amazing adventures and deep conversations and shared the trials and tribulations and joys and heartaches of living away from home for the first time, I sat alone in my room at home and stared out the window. It was awful. I was unbearably lonely and, after a year and a half, I couldn’t stand it any more. So I sat down and had a long talk with my mom and we agreed that I would move into the dorm the following year, my junior year, so I could finally become a proper part of the student body.