Get Some Skills!

You know what? I miss college. I really had a great time there. I went to Katharine Gibbs, a tiny school located on Boston's ultra-trendy Newbury Street. The unassuming front door looks like the service enterance to the Crate and Barrel next door. Maybe it's Pottery Barn. The point is, if you didn't know it was there, you probably would never even notice it.

Unfortunately, I only stayed in contact with one person. Well, two if you count Jose, which I don't because I've known him since high school.

A few months before graduation, I went on a road trip with Neil, one of the guys in class, to Charlotte, NC to go to this big comic convention there. Why? I had nothing else to do. Really. He just called up and asked if I wanted to go and I said "Why not?" He was going because he'd been apprenticing with a comic book artist named Pop Mhan and he was going to show a few sketches and even sit at the table with him. It was pretty cool. Anyway, at the hotel Neil was nervously drawing his sketches, tearing up paper and cursing, while I was doodling some pictures of my own. I was way too shy to show anything to professionals, but I showed Neil what I did. It was a picture of two of our classmates, Phil and Kristina.



He thought it was hysterical and captured their personas perfectly. Phil and Kristina were inseperable. He was this big gentle hulk and she was a tiny little ball of adorable anger. The three of us used to go to lunch together every day, and the whole time he'd complain about his crazy ex-girlfriend, and she'd complain about her boyfriend, Jay. Sometimes she's come to school with bruises and she'd say Jay was just playing. That pissed me off a great deal, and I know it pissed off Phil, but she continued to go out with this jerk and even though her and Phil had this cute, funny ying-yang relationship, they never ended up together. That kind of bummed me out. Like I said, I lost contact with everybody, so I hope she's okay.

So I drew this picture of the two of them, and then I got an idea to make a yearbook for all the students in my class. I drew a picture for each student, some portraying what their personal intrests were and some as parodies of movies catered to the individual student's personality.


We'll start with Kristina. Like I said, she was just the cutest thing. But if you piss her off, you'd better be prepared to suffer! Once, Jose had a dream that I had her locked in my basement. I was wearing a lab coat and rubbing my hands together, saying, "I'm gonna keep her!" When he told her about it, she hit me and said "Why would you do that?" First of all, it was a dream. It wasn't even my dream! Women are nuts. Anyway to capture her spirit (and lock it in the basement) I drew her in a happy little cartoon world looking very innocent, until you notice the giant mallet she's got behind her back. She loved the picture, which is good, because she punches pretty hard for such a skinny little chick.


This is Neil. He was sort of a Goth-Metal type guy. He lived in Salem, known for it's infamous witch trials, and is into the whole Wiccan thing. So I drew him as Bram Stoker's Dracula, sucking blood from a heart through a straw.


Neil always hung out with Sam. Sam's previous job was a cook on a submarine. He had a little...accident with a vegitable cutting tool and lost a finger, but when I was drawing his picture, I forgot which hand. So if you notice, his picture has 4 fingers on both hands. Yes, I realize how wrong that is. He worked at a BBQ place called Jake & Earl's, but I heard he lives in Texas now. Sam could be loud and opinionated, which scared off a few of the other students, but I got along good with him. Me, Neil, Sam, Phil and Kristina usually hung out together. Sam's a good guy.


Chandra was really cool. One time she came back from lunch and a few of her shirt buttons were undone and no one told her for most of the day. I guess I could have picked a better Chandra moment to share. She did a report on Mary J. Blige once. Yeah, I liked the first one better, too. This picture pretty much sums her up. Chandra was one mean motha-Shut yo' mouth! I'm just talkin' 'bout Chandra.


The first person I ever talked to in college was Marcia. She was a biker chick in her 30's who'd been a hair dresser for years and was looking for a change in careers. She was really great; we had kind of a big sister, little brother thing going. The other thing about Marcia was her husband's name was Ox or Rhino or some huge scary animal.


I've known Jose since high school. He worked at Blockbuster for years, but after college he jumped ship and went to work for Video to Go, where he spends a considerable amount of time in the porn room doing God knows what. If you look at the posters on the back wall on this picture, you can see "What's Eating Gilbert Godfried" with Gilbert's head superimposed over Johnny Depp's. I'm hillarious.

There were two guys in our class that we called the Backstreet Boys, because of their pretty-boy image. One was Alex (aka Chandler), who I drew sitting on a couch at Central Perk with the cast of Friends. I still like the concept, but it didn't come out the way I wanted it to, so I'm not going to show it here. Sorry. Move along.


The other Backstreet Boy was Anthony. Anthony was a basketball nut, so I put him on a Wheaties box. Alex and Anthony were cool guys, but I'll admit everyone, including myself, got them confused. I think even they did a few times, if that even makes sense. They didn't look the same at all, it's just the names I guess...


Sakeo was a blast. When we first started school, he and this other kid Tai used to breakdance on the tables. This usually ended with Keo getting too close to the crux where four tables joined and collapsed the whole thing, screaming all the way down. He acted super-confident around the guys, but when there was a girl involved, he was even more shy than me, and I had a crippling fear of rejection, so that's pretty bad. Jose took him to Hooters, and he was so nervous, he pretended he couldn't speak English. Then there was the librarian. He had a thing for the librarian. She was teaching us HTML for some reason, and Keo was in the back row, leaning his seat back, I guess trying to get a better view of her. A few seconds later, he lost balance and his chair tipped over. He quickly got up, waved his hands in the air to show he was alright, and sat back down. After class he was running around saying, "Green thong! She was wearing a green thong!" A new girl came to class third semister and he was obsessed with her. She was very quiet and none of us knew her name; we all called her Foreign Girl. Every time she walked out of the room, Keo would smile and say "Foreign Girl, yeah!" (sometimes it was "Yeah, Foreign Girl) I found this funny because he himself was foreign. Keo didn't show up for graduation, which sucks because he never got to see this picture. It's one of my favorite pictures, too. I really like how the sky came out. Oh well.


One thing Sam and Neil (hey...when you say their names together, you get actor Sam Neil!) loved to do was tease Kristen about her complete lack of movie knowledge. When she saw this picture, she admited that she didn't know the answer. I'm serious.


Mark was a quiet kid. He could draw like crazy, but he didn't really talk all that much in class. But as far as yearbook pictures go, this might be my favorite. Just a simple play on his last name.


Dave. Little Dave. Dave looked exactly like Michael Jackson in the Jackson 5 days. He was older than me, but he looked nine. I was kind of afraid he was going to be offended by his picture, but he got a kick out of it.


Jen is sitting in her favorite painting. Jose had a thing for her when we first started school, and since I somehow always seemed to be in the same group as her, he asked if I could help him out. You know, put in a good word. But the reason he liked her is because she reminded him of his old girlfriend, and all kinds of red flags go up when that happens. No good can come from that. He was pretty bitter about it for a while, especially because I used to go to lunch and stuff with her. Once I went to breakfast with Jen, Chandra, Kristina and Phil, and on the way back, Phil went in to Dunkin Donuts and the rest of us waited outside. While we were waiting, two homeless guys with maybe three teeth between them asked if "These were my women?" Before I could even say anything he had his arm around my shoulder asking if I minded if his friend took their picture, while the other guy was already asking the girls to smile. So two homeless guys randomly took a picture of Jen, Chandra and Kristina. And they thought I was a pimp. Cool.

Next time... We meet the rest of the class, and I explain why I left $60 by a teacher's bed.

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Back in the Day

This week we've been getting Brianna prepared for her first day of kindergarten. It's got me thinking about my first day. Getting on that big yellow bus and discovering what I can only describe as "bus smell," which is sort of a combination of gasoline and thirty or so peanut butter and jelly sandwiches mixed with that inimitable new plastic smell.



I remember waiting for the bus with my mom, Jen, and her mom. I remember my Gremlins lunchbox. I remember I wore a striped shirt. Okay, so I'm just describing the picture, but there really are some things I remember about that first day away from home.

In fact, the first memory I have of school is of a kid named Raymond. I don't remember much about Raymond, and to be honest, I don't think I ever even saw him. But Raymond sat behind me on the bus on that first day of kindergarten. And Raymond was not ready to interact with other children. Raymond spazzed out. He grabbed the kid in front of him (yeah...that would be me) and started choking him from behind with what I imagine to be a glint of sheer joy in his eye. He was grabbed by some adults and abruptly pulled off me, cementing at least one more year of sitting at home shoving crayons up his nose. I'll give him credit: not many people can get kicked out of school before they ever set foot in it. Here's to you Raymond, you crazy bastard, wherever you are.

Anyway, in honor of Brianna's first day of school, here are some of my memories from Thomas V. Nash Elementary School.

Our principal was Mr. McCorkle. Otis H. McCorkle, the most principal-sounding name ever. We used to call the papers we'd get from him "a notice from Otis." Every time he announced something over the loudspeaker he would start with "Ah, attention please..." and end with "That is all. Thank you!"

I was in Miss Shea's first grade class when the Challanger exploded. We watched it on television. I don't think I really understood what was going on. All I knew was that something important must have happened for them to bring the television from the library into the classroom. I will never forget that day.

I remember reading with Ms. Brown, the librarian. She reminded me of Diane from Cheers. She used to read "Riki Tiki Tavi" and "Miss Nelson is Missing!" to us. One year Ms. Brown got married, but her new name was ridiculously long and hard to pronounce, so I continued to refer to her as "Ms. Brown."

I remember Brian Larkin, effecionately known for one reason or another as "Bubba." Bubba Larkin was our school's Scut Farkas. A schoolyard thug whose antics invariably got him banned from field day every year.

I remember Mrs. Lavangie, the lunch lady. We weren't allowed to talk during lunch, and it was her job to enforce the law. She walked around with a clipboard, shouting "Ah, that's a check!" at anyone who made a sound. If you got three checks, you'd have to sit up on the stage of the cafeteria-auditorium-gymnasium until lunch was over. I guess that was supposed to be bad. I don't know. You'd think they would have come up with something a little more threatening. Usually she had her hands full with the sixth graders, so us younger kids talked quietly while she was down at the other end of the room.

And who could forget the school's flamboyant music teacher, Mr. LaPiere? He was the musical equivilant of Richard Simmons, minus the tiny shorts. He'd wheel his piano into the class once a week and make us practice our singing exercises. He always hit impossibly high notes; I kind of wonder if his balls never dropped.

Nnnnnnnneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

That's what he'd have us do. Say the word "new" and hold it until our lungs collapsed. Sometimes he'd bring a big red rubber dodgeball in and throw it to whoever he decided should say "new" next. That was doubly embarrassing for me because that exposed both my inability to sing or catch a ball.

Nnnnnnnneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Years later when I met kids from other parts of town, I learned that they too had Mr. LaPiere, except rather than a piano, he'd bring in a little keyboard. That's a shame, because you can't really get the same sound from a keyboard as you can with a piano. Plus, it was just plain funny to watch him push that giant piano around the whole school.

When I was in fifth grade, one of the sixth grade teachers was fired. From what I heard the reasoning behind it was that he was narcoleptic, and would sometimes fall asleep in the middle of class. I didn't really know the whole story, but the whys didn't matter. The important part of the story was that now there was only one sixth grade teacher. Miss Hanian.

Miss Hanian. Her name alone is enough to send a chill down your spine. Hanian, as in heinous. She was far scarier than anything any kid could dream up. A fearsome disiplanarian that screamed with all the throaty horror of the fires of Hell. On any given day, you could hear her Banshee cry echo down the halls and through the very spines of trembling kids. At recess, she stood on a hill with mirrored sunglasses watching over the playground like a gargoyle. Nobody wanted Ms. Hanian.

As sixth grade loomed closer, there was still no one to fill the vacancy. We were doomed.

But we weren't doomed. Well, half of us weren't, anyway. That summer they hired a new teacher, Mr. Brink. That year would go on to be the best time I ever had in school. That's actually kind of sad, considering I still had six more years of school left.

But it was a great year. Full of firsts. It was the first year the Barbie twins were in the same class. Ben and Megan Barbie, together for the first time. It was also the first time the three Elizabeths were in the same class. The Smart One, the Cute One, and the Quiet One. We didn't have a Ringo. Honestly, they were all smart, and all cute. But one was just a little smarter, one just a little cuter, and only one of them was quiet.

I always had a thing for the Quiet One. I remember I used to see her at recess in first grade. I didn't know who she was, but I couldn't take my eyes off her. In first grade! She ended up in my class the next year, and again in forth and sixth grades. One year at Jen's birthday party, Jen started crying because she said we were ruining her party. I don't even remember what exactly happened, I just remember her saying that. I think it was because I was the only boy there.

I was always the only boy at her parties, but that year she also invited Nathan Stockton. She had a crush on him, but he had "soccer practice" and couldn't make it. Maybe she couldn't take seeing us flirt, if you could even call it that. It never got any further than flirting, and I never told Liz after all those years that I liked her, something that would become a recurring theme in my life. So that's how that whole deal started.

Mr. Brink was great. His classroom didn't look like other classrooms. He had a huge Happy Meal collection on a shelf running all across the room. We learned about ancient Egypt and created board games based on what we learned. We disected squid. When he had gym, we played Brinkball, which was kind of like Doctor and Spy.

Sometime's he'd tell these corny jokes under the guise of anecdotes about himself, or more commonly, his cousin Otto. These stories always ended with a few laughs, a lot of groans, and Lakeisha, possibly the sweetest person ever and one of Weymouth's two black people, saying "I don't get it." Then twenty minutes later when we are doing math she'd say "The pig squealed. Now I get it!" and laugh uncontrollably for three minutes.

At some point, Mr. Brink had to have his gall bladder removed and was out of school for a few weeks. I can't remember who we had as a replacement, because there was a few different substitutes we used to have. There was Ms. Log (pronounced Low-g), who scared everybody by scowling all the time and looking like Bea Arthur. She used to give us the first answer on tests and say "It's my gift to you." She even sounded like Bea Arthur. Then there was Mr. Young, the Oldest Man on the Planet. And of course Mr. DiSessa, who looked like a turtle. Or a shriveled up dead indian, like those Weequay things in Return of the Jedi.

The school closed after that year. I was going to another school for seventh grade anyway, but it was still sad. They closed a few schools and restructured the whole school system because there were too many schools and not enough kids, then re-opened a few years later when there were too many kids and not enough schools. I guess the people who make decisions like that didn't realize that all the babies being born in the town when they closed the schools would be starting school in a few years. Gotta love the system.

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