The bubblings of our High School Reunion have begun. I can’t shut-up about how excited I am…ok, here’s a little background:
Little Mara begins her education by attending Preschool. She cries her heart out for the first two weeks. Her Mom has to stand in the doorway, holding her baby brother, or else Mara will freak out. Courage is slow but soon Mom no longer has to attend Preschool…Mara can go at it alone.
5 Year Old Mara attends Kindergarten; it’s off to a shaky start. She is a huge crybaby. She cries over not being able to find scissors, (it’s even recorded in her progress report). Gradually things improve. She is sloppy and creative and loud and bossy. She gains support, a few friends, and joins Bluebirds. She begins formal ballet training in second grade.
In third grade everything goes downhill. Mara can’t afford a Cabbage Patch Doll. All the other girls play with their dolls during recess, Mara plays with her cheap knock off doll. Her huge crush on Ryan R. goes unnoticed for the next three years. She realizes that she is unpopular and unliked. She responds by dressing outlandishly, ridiculous clothes and multiple scrunchies in her hair. Mara is trying to imitate her favorite sassy character, Claudia, from the Babysitter’s Club series. It fails, the kids think she’s a freak. Mara brags about being a ballet dancer, but no one cares.
By 6th grade she’s pretty beat down. At the height of the “Just Say No to Drugs” 80’s campaign, Mara is terrified by the crack cocaine videos, the AIDS epidemic, and falling down a well like Baby Jessica. She has become an insomniac.
In 7th grade Mara attempts to shed her nerdy past and reinvent herself. She sneaks lip-gloss into her backpack, she wears her long hair in a ponytail at the crown of her head, and she fluffs out her bangs with Aqua Net. She rolls her skirts up to make them micro-minis once she’s out the door and in school. She falls in love with many skater boys–who don’t return the feelings. She keeps a record in her Snoopy Diary of which guys talk to her in school, who likes who, and who her best friends are at the moment.
It all goes to hell in 8th grade. Mara is recognized as an aspiring writer, and is moved to Honors English and Social Studies with all the Talented & Gifted Kids. They immediately reject her. The boys rip her a new one every time the teacher leaves the room. The girls scoot their desks away, talk shit about her in the locker room, and threaten to beat her up occasionally. At the school talent show Mara further embarrasses herself by performing a lyrical dance piece to the electronic sounds of “Silk Road.” It gets so bad, that on a day Mara is absent the English Teacher has a sit-down talk with the entire class about how “you all need to be nicer to Mara, she’s sensitive.” This further sabotages any chance Mara ever has to redeem her once fledging popularity.
High School is looked at as a fresh start. Mara goes all out and gives her stick straight hair a spiral perm for her upcoming freshman year. She decides to wear only black and white–preferably polka dots if possible. She buys a fresh pair of white Keds and pulls her bangs back in a sort of Elaine from Seinfeld coif. 9th grade is incredibly shaky. Mara doesn’t really know who her friends are, who she is, what her expectations should be. She flounders in Math, and is put in the dreaded Assist Math Class with all the kids who flunked out, ran away, got expelled, and hate school. Several of the gentlemen in the class develop unhealthy crushes on Mara, and she spends a lot of time avoiding flirtation. One of these men was allegedly a real church-going psycho and was rumored to have actually thrown a pair of open scissors at a person.
Despite all this Mara excels at English and Drama. She slowly meets other quirky Theater kids…like Kris, Kay, Hanna, Beth, Genevieve, Todd, and Ben. A lot of these kids are thrown in the New Waver category and wear clunky Doc Martins and weird, asymmetrical hair-do’s. She is in school plays, dance recitals, and begins to tour with the Children’s Touring Ensemble. She continues to always “Say NO to drugs and alcohol.”
Mara is still struggling to beat down the mockery in Honors English and History. She meets other people in class, people who like her writing and think the Popular Kids are stupid. She has random, vague, crushes that don’t go anywhere. She suffers every time she stays home on a school dance night. Her Mom laments that there aren’t any nice guys out there for her to go to dances with…what’s wrong with these guys? Mara craves romance, the kind you read in books, the kind you see on TV. She has a brief, disastrous, affair with a guy who irons his socks before school and wears jean shorts with a shirt and tie. Than she goes after the unattainable jazz sax player who everyone likes, and he dumps her on the ride home from Junior Prom.
At the end of 11th grade, the Epic Love Story begins, as she is seduced by a crazy punk rocker who sends her love letters written on the peels of oranges. She begins a ridiculous, mostly long-distance relationship with this man, who graduates a year ahead of her and joins the navy. The rest of high school is clouded with her sudden punk rock life style: Multiple concerts, many backstage break-ins, and numerous nights at La Luna. She starts hanging around a certain band, making them origami animals, and attending their sober house parties (the whole band is in a 12 Step Alcohol Recovery Program). She quits dancing. She quits performing. She is lost and confused, about to graduate from High School with a very reasonable GPA of 3.4, but Mara bombs the SAT. Her score is below 800, (let’s just get that out in the open). Because she can’t afford the private tuition of a certain Catholic college, she settles on going to the U of WA.
9 Days before graduation, a classmate of Mara’s dies while hiking at Mount St. Helen’s. The class of ‘95 is heartbroken because he had been nominated as “Most Likely to Succeed.” What do you do when that person dies? Everything feels surreal and horrible and amazing–because life is precious of course.
Mara finds a summer job at the Portland Saturday Market selling hemp bracelets and phemo beads. Her long-distance relationship failing, she briefly goes out with a 23 year old hippie who works at The Grateful Dead booth at the market. This is the summer that Jerry Garcia Dies, and the hippie ceremoniously decides to wear a Grateful Dead Bear every day of the week. Mara’s punk rock sensibilities have no problem dumping his ass.
Mara goes to college where she lives with high school friend, Dena, and it’s all so big and terrifying. Seattle treats Mara well, and she joins a late night comedy group, performs on the radio for Savage Love Live, and dabbles with an English major which she promptly rejects for a Drama major.
The summer after her freshman year, Mara works at the Port of Portland importing Hyundai’s. This is where she meets Josh…She is 19 and he is 20. (Looking back on it now, Mara had no idea she was kicking it with her future husband). They both have old-school, Canon, cameras. They walk all over Portland and take black and white pictures. Josh moves to Colorado and becomes a pen-pal. Mara reconnects with the Navy Punk Rocker and breaks up with him once she realizes his speed addiction is serious.
Mara begins dancing again, working on a Dance Minor in addition to the Drama. She writes one woman shows. She founds Origami Girl Productions. She becomes notorious around town. After graduating with her liberal arts degree, she goes through five jobs in seven months. She leaves it all to move to Colorado and become a snowboard bum with Josh. She becomes a choreographer…a teacher…a continuous lover of dance clothing. She decides, the hell with it, let’s get married.
All of this and now, boom, high school reunion. Do I want to parade myself around in front of all those mean Honor class boys? Do I want to flaunt myself in front of Ryan R.? Do I want to pay tribute to our dear friend who died so shortly before graduation? You bet I do…and maybe these are all the wrong reasons and I will be incredibly disappointed. But I’m just so damn curious. I spent so much time with these people, fretting over grades and papers and school dances…I want to see where they’ve gone with the education we were given. I want to share my successes and failures because I practically wear them on my sleeve…I really do.