Haines His Way

Dearest BK, that was the best rant of all!  I agree with you totally.  How is your short fuse day developing?  Things seem better.

DR Jenny,  another voice from the Outside Looking In.  My first comment is that you remind me so much of my 14 year-old goddaughter and her feelings about growing up in the Horace Mann school.  She has her dance and theatre friends as a support and she's a beautiful young lady regarded as a freak/geek by shallow people who don't deserve to wipe her butt.  I like DR Panni's MIT appellation.

As to my tortured childhood, get out the violins:  poor going to a wealthy school, a lonely dreamer unable to relate to my peer group, a reader, a sissy, a crazy mother; it wasn't a pretty picture.  I had a few friends but I wanted to be in the In Crowd, as the song tells us, and I envied the jocks and the cheerleaders.  A few liked me, but I think more were just used to me from being in school with me from grade 1.  Later, while I was trying to find my way in the world doing stupid jobs and driving my mother crazier, I taught creative dramatics to some of my classmates' children.  Most of the ones I sought approval and recognition from between 1951-1964 were divorced, on their second or third marriage, or  having an affair behind their spouse's back.  I remember running into one of my classmates, head cheerleader as I recall, around 1976.  She had a big house, two children, a drinking problem and an ugly divorce.  I thank God I never got caught in that trap.  Enjoy the book, find new worlds, dream and escape.  That's the best revenge.

The portion of A STAR IS BORN that could have made the difference in winning Judy the Oscar® was the juxtaposition of the dressing room scene with the cut "Long Face" number.  The scene is much less effective without the contrast between desperate Vicky offscreen and perky Vicki onscreen.  I agree that the other scenes probably wouldn't have made a difference with the Academy members, but that scene/song combination could have done it for her.

It shouldn't matter if there were 52 or 552, that was the point of going with a higher bandwidth company.  I e-mailed them - it was very temporary, though, thank goodness.

Jenny, it occurs to me - tell Maya to bring you the Kritzer books, she's got both of them.

All right, everyone, new question for the day: How many of us have been the outsiders, like Jenny has found herself to be?

Or like Bruce K. has admitted?

Or, hey, like myself?

Yep, always was, always will be.  There are people who admire me, but I'll never be, and never have been, at any time or place a part of the "popular" crowd.

Think in terms of the gay scene in Los Angeles.  I never felt that I belonged in West Hollywood.  I always was much more comfortable in Silverlake, which is by far a more ecclectic crowd.  (They still have piano bars!  Try finding anyone in West Hollywood who even knows, or will admit to knowing, where middle C is located!)

Softball, as in gay softball leagues?  Count on me to be there, but not as a player.  I was always the scorekeeper, and a damn good one.  But who cheers for the scorekeeper?

And so on and so forth, blah blah blah.

Jenny, if it's any consolation, there was a certain moment when I graduated from High School, up in the hills at the Starlight Bowl in Burbank, the only place large enough to hold the entire graduating class and families and friends.  (Ron Howard, same graduating class but in the "other" high school in Burbank, had to graduate in a football stadium.)  After the speeches, we-the-graduating-class were lined up down the hill (and it was a steep one; Starlight Bowl overlooks the entire San Fernando Valley) in height order, shortest to tallest.  Natch, at 6'2", I was way towards the back.  And the accoustics of the valleylet that the Bowl is set in were good enough that we could hear what was going on, as each name was called and that person crossed the stage to accept his or her diploma.

When my name was called, the largest, loudest cheer came from my fellow students.  Yeah, sure, a lot of that was because more of my fellows (and gal-lows) had already retaken their seats, but they all could have cheered for someone else just as loudly.  For some reason, they cheered for me.  I've never been sure if it was because I remained myself, or because I represented the underdogs in my entire class.

But it felt good.

Jenny, there are people in your own class that do admire you, but can't figure out how to say so.  Take my word on that one.

I'm looking forward to seeing you again this weekend.  But don't bring your chem homework with you!  You and der Brucer can work on that later, or on Friday nite.  

...Teenage girls also do quite a bit of drugs now, which I only recently found out (Apparently they take viagra?  I don't even want to know what sort of affects that must have on a female!). ...

Teenage girls walking around with stiffies?  At that age, their boyfriends are lucky to be walking around without them!  

Evening all.

Don’t worry about those girls, Jenny.  Your talking to another “outcast” when I was in school.  If I had penny for every time I rode the bus home crying, I would be a rich person right now.  My crime? (cover your eyes here, guys)   I developed faster than the other girls did and I wore coke bottle thick glasses.  I hated my body.  Top that off with being painfully shy (still am) and I was a very easy target.  Now when I think back,  at least when I turned sideways and  you were a block away, you didn’t have squint to see if I was a female.  LOL.  Sorry guys.  What I didn’t know was the reason they teased me was because they were jealous of me.

Any who,  got some nice comments today form the directors secretary  She said, “Oh, you’ve reached your goal.”  I had to tell her, no, I still have over 20 lbs to go if I decide to go for 115.  She couldn’t believe it.  

I’m trying to hold off on clothes shopping but I may have to get an item or two.  My pants are getting a little baggy.  No pity parties, please.  

Laugh of the day came from a co-worker.  We were crammed on the elevator when it opened and a lady said, “Do you have room for a baby?”.  My friend piped up and said, “A baby, yeah, but not the Mama!”.  

Re the pubic hair shaving (there's an opening line) - one of the best lines in the season's premiere of THE SOPRANOS had to do with that.

You know, Charles, I called one of those $200.00 an hour guys, but, I am pretty sure he didn't know anything about computers. Okay, except maybe hard drives.

Just so we don't condemn all young types... The following story was related to me today by a writer friend in his late fifties in Victoria, British Columbia. He was taking the bus somewhere and went to the bus shelter to wait -- and there he saw the most horrible homophobic graffiti.
Two obviously straight young men, students probably, arrived at the bus shelter. He watched to see what their reaction would be. They read some of the stuff and laughed in a kind of disbelieving way. And then, to his amazement, one of them took out a black marker and blacked it all out!
The bus came. As they boarded together, my friend said to them, "As a gay man, I appreciate what you just did." The young men were at first taken aback, then looked pleased.

I write everything in Word.  I have Windows XP and Word does it all for me.  I set up my little indent shortcuts for dialogue, stage direction, character names, etc. for scripts - for the novels, I just merrily type away.  

Jenny...This too shall pass.  Though it may seem like it now, High School is not the world.  I was a rather weird kid myself in high school, I did have a good group of friends, but was never what you would call in the IN crowd.  My class was also rather small...168 kids...so everyone knew everyone.  

But I've also remembered something my High School creative writing teacher told me my senior year when I was going off to college.  He said:  "The next foour years of your life are going to bring changes in so many ways you cannot perceive."  He was absolutely right.  It was where I found myself, the people I belonged with, the people I enjoyed, my true calling, as it were.  In college, all those small-time cliques and petty jealousies and all those things you thought were do or die become as nothing and put in their proper perspective.  Nobody in the big world has time for that, pardon the phrase, "high school shit".  

I must tell you also that I've been back to every one of my high school reunions since the twentieth (just went to my 35th in October) and I've enjoyed every one of them.  And what I found out was that all those popular kids were just as afraid and insecure as the rest of us.  Some had  terrible secrets, some had bad luck, some found out that in real life no one cares whether you won the big game or not.  You also found out that most of us couldn't really know each other because we didn't really know ourselves yet.

After the 20th I wrote a class newsletter for about five years, because going back had been a seminal experience for me.  Here's something I wrote in that first issue:  "In the ensuing months, everytime I spoke or wrote to the old cronies or renewed acquaintances, we'd end up enthusiastically rehashing the events of the reunion...delighting in the warmth and worth and camaraderie we found. Pleased that the old strictures and stereotypes imposed by an oft-times insensitive adolescent society had, if not totally faded into oblivion, at least been relegated to the insignificance they deserved.  There was the wonderful realization that we had all grown up and gone past what we were and the satisfying recognition that what we were had helped to shape what we now are...a pretty okay bunch of rather decent, interesting individuals."

You may never have that sort of reconcillation with your old high school mates, but you will grow past them.  You're too smart and attractive and talented not to. These experiences are only the beginning, far from the end.  It gets better and more exciting.  Those who stay stuck in their glory days of high school lead very sad lives.

Jenny,

Who else on that bus could have expressed herself so well? You were able to take me back in time. Sure, your honesty and gentle humor made me recall some miserable experiences. But more importantly it made me remember what I privately liked about myself.

Thank you.

By the way, it was in tenth grade that I was lucky enough to meet my friend Patty. We're still talking about those obnoxious classmates.

I have to say that I'm truly overwhelmed by the kindness on this board.  I'm truly lucky to have found it and all of you.