PLUMLY PREP SEPT 1964
Friday, Sept 18 – 64 I can’t believe another week has gone by! This is amazing – I am actually too busy living to write! This has got to be a first. Friday seems like the only time because we don’t have sports in the afternoon. Lots of people are taking weekends but I’m saving mine up till I have somewhere special to go. I’ll tell you about my classes. ENG 1 – Strictly for losers. Miss Wienand is so old we can’t believe she’s still alive and not something that struggled its way out of the Tomb of Ligeia. When we speak to her we have to shout and then her head wobbles and her eyes fill with tears. At first I was shocked but you gradually get hardened. She quotes the Lady of Shalott by the hour. Genevieve says it’s the anesthesia they gave her in the war – now she is crazy. There’s a funny boy in class named Ted – he is not sexy at all but he is hilarious. When he said he preferred Coney Island of the Mind to Keats she got so upset she forgot to give us homework. Reading A Separate Peace. FR II- Not bad – taught by a real Frenchwoman named Ann-Marie Bustas. She wears very high heels and very tight skirts so she can barely walk and she teases her hair high in back with a rattail comb. I am smug because I aced the first test! She says I can read Françoise Sagan if I want to. ENG Hist – is my favorite class taught by a sexpot named Nichols. His teeth are stained with nicotine and his hands shake but he is very funny about Ethelred the Unready and the Venerable Bede. (Unfortunately he is married.) He never fails to crack us up. BIBLE - a romp through hell. Zealots 5, Sadducees 0! The teacher is the janitor – he probably works for free so they don’t put him in a home. He wears a hearing aid as big as a toaster and if you want to disrupt class all you have to do is hum. He takes it off his head and tinkers with it for minutes at a time. Gerry Woo is trying to program him by remote control but so far it hasn’t worked. Gerry is another writer (he carries his sci fi novel with him everywhere) unfortunately he spits when he talks and jumps in his seat as if he has bugs in his pants. (He probably does. I hear the hygiene at Boys End is nothing to write home about. Dr Freud to the contrary I am glad I’m not a boy. Sounds hazardous to the health.) So Gerry & I won’t be forming a writing coven anytime soon. MATH – Over my head from Day 1. I have a Math Deficiency Disease. Need I say more? SCIENCE – I have always admired Science from afar but here’s my chance to see it up close. I’ve promised myself to work really hard this term and plumb its mysteries. What else? Oh yes, HOME EC = putrid and ART is for babies. I’m talking finger-painting and cutting things out of magazines. If we are really good Mrs. Kurtz will let us make a potholder to take home to our mommies. Me, who made a pajama coat over and over again from scratch! (Teacher rejected it the first 4 times.) We are imprisoned in hockey four afternoons a week while a man-woman makes me run so much I’ve developed a heart condition. We are required to take at least one hobby and I’ve signed up for Workshop Theatre but the teacher hasn’t shown yet because he’s busy getting a divorce. I’m sure my impetigo is no longer contagious but no boys have come close enough to find out. A few drips circle warily and have to be dropped in their tracks before they spew. Sat. Sept 19 - 64 The most amazing thing has happened! I am the leader of the freshman girls! There are only nine of us living at Girls End! (The others are day students.) I know I am an unlikely leader type – I am not bragging or being aggressive. I think I am simply les panic stricken than anybody else. They are in hysterics about grades, boys, hair, parents, I say Why worry about it? And they sob gratefully. They put me in charge of the Freshman Skit for Camp Suppers. Nobody wants to look stupid because there may be Boys paying attention. Har to tell which pair of beady eyes around a campfire belong to a handsome face or an agile brain so we can take no chances. We are putting on GOLDFIGURE –a girl whose incredible physique turns men into statues. What do you think? Sun. Sept 20 – 64 Life is such a great adventure! I am planning to be so happy my whole life I wake up laughing. Got a letter from Andrea yesterday that made me momentarily nostalgic about The Past. Oh the times we snuck out of the house in the deep of the night wearing our father’s shirts. But one can’t look back one must move forward. Mon. Sept 21 - 64 A protective life regulated by bells. We come up the stairs at days’ end singing, hockey sticks over our shoulders like the dwarves in Snow White. Friends, bathrobes, curlers, bathing suits hang everywhere. You are Not Alone. You go into your room and kick off your hockey shoes so forcefully the spikes damage the wall and throw yourself full-length on the bed even though you have only 15 mins to get pretty for dinner. Your roommate is laughing and throwing socks about. Life is good. Yet somehow I am wary of this idyll. Tues Sept 22 – 64 I wish I was beautiful. It would make my life so much easier. But no, I have the Nose of the Aallyns, and the Jaw of the Boxer Rebels. Writing under the sheets ONCE AGAIN by flashlight. This would mean a deten if caught which involves cleaning flowerpots down at the greenhouse. It could be worse. Boys have to shovel manure, which explains their smell. Many are the benefits of the female sex. The smell of laundry soap is strong under here. Not that the sheets are clean – heavens no – they are stained with apple juice and blood. A brain-damaged girl got me in the ankle with her hockey stick. Got my first KOB tonight so of course I have to memorialize it. A boy in my art class named Bob. I don’t know about Bob. I’m not sure he’s got what it takes. He’s too nice. Oh where will I find the boy f my dreams? My eyes wander over the Senior Class. Left my razor kit at home and my legs are a hairy mess. Plus I wear kneesocks constantly and the rubber bands are cutting off my circulation. And my skin shows signs of becoming volcanic ground on a rich diet of creamed chicken and scalloped potatoes. Run for the boats, men, the Angry Goddess is about to explode! At dinner I sit next to a very cute boy named Phil although he’s at least an inch shorter than me. Got an interesting book out of the library about Anne Boleyn. Those Tudors certainly knew how to live. Well, enough of burning the midnight battery. See you in the AM. Thurs. Sept 24. 1964 Rewriting Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England. She has her ideas, I have mine. ISABELLA OF VALOIS – Unprepossessing, yethinks? Look closer: this little chickadee is padded like a football player. Life was very rough and tumble in those days. Her face is all greased up and her ears seem to be missing. She married Richard II when she was eight and had no idea what was in store. Later he either was murdered or committed suicide so he wouldn’t be murdered. JOANNA OF NAVARRE - Things are getting worse. Two fungus growths on either side of this head. She is wearing one of the new French bras but she still has to hold up her chest. When the French captured her, they gave her right back. Can you blame them? KATHERINE OF VALOIS - Isabella’s sister but you’d never know it. She’s a dead ringer for Ringo Starr. No chest, a potbelly, and when they called her “Katherine the Fair” they were being sarcastic. Still, Henry V was madly in love with her. Maybe he was kidding. MARGARET OF ANJOU – Maggie also well padded for the games, but content to take life as a bystander. From the expression on her face you can tell her team is not winning. She was a goalie in the Wars of the Roses. ELIZABETH WOODVILLE – Her head is wrapped in mosquito netting and she is sucking on a lemon. Your guess is as good as mine what she was up to. ANNE OF WARWICK - More sport, Old English Style. In one hand she holds a hockey stick, in the other, the ball. ELIZABETH OF YOURK – An amateur magician. Saying, “Nothing up my sleeves, nothing up my socks.” I’d watch those sleeves, though. KATHERINE OF ARAGON – Pictured holding a dead bouquet of flowers to symbolize her husbands whom she beat at wrestling. First one died, second one divorced her. More anon! Sun. Sept 27 – 64 Madness reigns! I’ve been behaving strangely for the past three days. Ah me. It is just too much that I have not been invited to the fall dance, and girls can’t invite boys here. Still there’s six days left. I will be disappointed if I don’t get KOBS from six boys all madly in love with me and threatening to throw themselves into the lake with one mighty splash. I can dream, can’t I? Saturday was Night Problems – a strange affair where they blindfold girls & boys, put them in trucks and dump them in the woods couple by couple and make them find their way home. I was dumped off with Art the Wolf who made no moves on me but very practically suggested we follow the railroad tracks to the school! There was plenty of moon. We were the first ones back and won the box of cookies (which I gave him because I hate ginger snaps.) Thurs Oct 1 - 64 Guess what, I’m in the infirmary. Lovesick or Night Problems? When first I entered Nostrils the nurse thought I was faking. But I had a real temperature all right! The doctor says I have SPOTS on my tonsils! (Lovespots.) Dr. Jax is one of those smooth mass-production doctors who advertise things on TV. Probably an incipient sex maniac. Nostrils went snoopily through my bag asking what my Noxzema is for and confiscating my chocolate covered cherries (they were getting old.) Her nostrils really are amazing. You could pick her out of a crowd. She asked if Felix Krull, Confessions of a Confidence Man is a novel of sex and violence! I’m reading it but I don’t like it. Sometimes I read Vanity Fair (vey good! – Nostrils had heard of that one) and sometimes Nero Wolfe. There are two boys in the Boys’ Section and I can talk to them over the swing door but I can’t see them! I’m going to write them both KOBS. Nostrils says I’ll be here till Sun which means I’m down for the count at the dance. These male sickos will have to be my dates. Wed Oct 7 - 64 Life is so full. My whole being is just one big question mark. While waiting here to be fulfilled I am actually living. Reading Violet Brooke’s The Prisoners of the Tower. That’s what we are – prisoners of the tower. But at least it’s a co-ed tower. I am introduced to the Art of Shiking – which is Being where you are Not supposed to Be. “Off bounds”. It has many sophisticated ramifications such as jumping from window to window, even running between the chimneys on the roof playing Viet Cong Vs French Resistance. Or it could just mean meeting boys in Central after dark! Thurs Oct 8, 64 Got a “social warning” for “lights out” with a boy! It was only six o’clock for heaven’s sake! I have much to learn about the Art of Shiking. Things are rough for the Prisoners of the Tower. We were talking about hobbies. His is photography. I said mine is philosophy. Social philosophy. Like why people are so very, very strange. Also got a warning for not wearing a “covering” on my curlers in the upstairs Girls’ End Hall! What is this, Moulay Idis? What a place! Favorite song this week – “I like it” by Gerry & the Pacemakers. “I like it! I like it! I like the way you run your fingers through my hair…” Exactly. Doggerel for English: “To laugh and love and run and sing Are gifts beyond all price. And when I die for die I will I’ll feel no pain or strife. It is enough for me to know I’ve sipped the wine of life! In a way I’ll always live In all I’ve loved and seen The whirling whiteness of the snow The emerald spring of green. A rock that’s round and hard and smooth The restless roaring sea The pale blank beauty of the moon All have a piece of me. So I can die without a qualm ‘Cause death is never mean. Dying too is part of life – Remember – dirt is clean! Eng teacher gave me a B MINUS and asked me to write it again without rhyme! But since it’s in the past, why would I? Life rushes on, Master Gwill! Better get moving! I recited it at the dinner table (maybe it is more of a recitation piece) and – Miss Wormrest liked it so much she gave me her notebook from a Trip to France in 18 BC. It is full of sketches of fishermen and birds – the poems are unbelievably bad. There are a surprising number of breasts – even men had breasts in those days! Maybe she is a nympho-lesbo. TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 1965 - Brockton, Ohio Fifteen minutes to midnight and the tears are still drying on my cheeks. I say goodbye to childhood. Tonight Mom and Genevieve and Avril and I went to a concert at Avril’s school – my old school. It was like walking smack into the past—a nightmare come to life. Old Miss Quinn came lurching toward us like Boris Karloff in the Mummy – she was even trailing some sort of torn drapery. I stared disbelieving at the puniness of the drinking fountain –more like an animal watering device than any kind of implement to be used by human beings – was I EVER that small? The halls were narrow and grimy but I remember them in my dreams as vast and spacious with the edges seeming to drop away like unmapped territory. The children’s faces even seemed familiar – as if I grew up and they didn’t – maybe children’s faces are indistinguishable. The Auditorium was pathetic. It had a tiny stage – made of wretched splintered boards. I felt my rear end itch in memory. I imagined myself, old and famous, donating decent drapes to replace those ratty dust catchers. But probably it would be better to deny any association with this place. Of course Avril performed horribly. Years of relentless babying have softened that poor child’s brain. Genevieve and I walked home so as to avoid the reception afterwards. I don’t recall my mother going to a single one of my concerts – and Genevieve doesn’t remember it either. This mothering thing is something she’s only recently discovered – twenty years into the job. Oh well. As Genevieve says, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. When we got home we watched The Man from Uncle, (naturally Avril gets a TV!) then I worked on my novel about teenage stardom while Genevieve set her hair with beer cans. That’s because we were going to the movies - the second showing of 36 Hours and she might see someone. Genevieve had already seen it and couldn’t help giving me a running commentary. I need all the help I can get in war movies. My favorite part was when Pike and Anna were in the hole and the German soldier, looking in sees a nest of baby birds instead of them and whistles to the birds. I thought it was very mature of the scriptwriter to resist the urge to have him murder the baby birds. When I got home Daddy called me into the study where he had an application for summer theatre camp! I can go! Off to sleep in a haze of bliss.
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Alysse Aallyn
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