Chapter 136: The Winds of Change

Sunday, May 20, 1984

Church was indeed comforting in the way that it usually was. The ritual, the familiar hymns, Dr. Ott’s sermon — all of it was very ‘normal.’

Ironically, I might visit here more often when visiting Mom and Dad in this life than I had in my first. If nothing else, I was more confident both in my rebellion against Lutheran doctrine and also in being receptive to the rituals.

That said, once Dr. Ott departed, I might be done with most of those visits. Unless the history of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, varied widely, I suspected subsequent ministers would be less to my liking, and less willing to accept anyone who found them not to their liking.

We would see.

We ate lunch at home, with Dad promising to take us to the Warwick’s brunch next week. That made sense — it would be the day after graduation, and a nice time to celebrate.

In another of the thousands of inevitable ‘lasts,’ that made this the very last home-cooked Sunday dinner of our childhoods. Not the last overall, since we would visit and be here on Sundays, but those would always be visits. I doubted we would ever move back into the house again, as I had for summers while I was in college. We had our own home, and we would likely spend summers there — or traveling, if we could.

I don’t think Mom consciously realized it. We’d told her we would be gone most of the summer, and she’d accepted that, but she hadn’t internalized that it was now. If she had, I think this would’ve been a more bittersweet occasion. I was glad that it wasn’t. I could take it, but she would’ve had more trouble with it.

After all, in that crazy role reversal she had no idea about, I was the one who’d had children grow up and leave the nest. She hadn’t, yet.

As we were getting ready for Study Group, Dad called out, “Steve! Angie! You have to see this!”

We both came running.

Dad had the Chronicle open. On the front page of the local news section was the headline, ‘At Heralded Suburban School, Winds of Change Blow Strongly’. The sub-head was, ‘Memorial High, Once a Bastion of Tradition, Embraces the New’.

Dad shook his head. “I knew they’d interviewed you, but...”

He flipped the page. There was my picture, in one of my Debate outfits, clearly debating something. Angie’s picture was further down. She was arm-in-arm with Paige. They were in their prom dresses and smiling broadly.

He flipped the page, and there was our cast taking a bow after what was probably the Saturday performance of ‘Bye Bye Birdie’.

I shook my head. “Wow!” I said.

“Wow?!” Angie said. “I’m way past wow! I’m in the Chronicle, in my prom dress, with my girlfriend! Oh my goodness!”

Dad chuckled. “It’s a good article. Obviously, you’ll both want to read it, and probably want copies. You both come off well, which is no surprise.”

“We’ll buy copies,” I said. “I’ll want to keep one.”

“So will I!” Angie said.

We wound up buying a copy each on the way to Study Group. None of us had read it yet, and we might wait a bit. Just ... not that long. We expected Study Group to be ... intense. This was the second-to-last time that we would ever get together to study for high school classes. We would certainly get together again — Gene was planning a Memorial Day hangout and party, which would officially end the group as a regular occasion — but this was nearly the end.

The Chronicle story was a distraction, but that couldn’t be helped. These things happen.

After some almost perfunctory studying, we all started reading the article. Gene had read it, but didn’t spoil it. It was news to everyone else — even Cammie, who grumbled at Gene for not telling her earlier. From his expression, I’m sure it was intentionally done to mess with her just a bit and get exactly the reaction he’d received.

The article itself was fascinating. It highlighted all of the recent changes, juxtaposing them with Memorial’s long-time reputation for conservativeness. For instance, one noteworthy section said, ‘At a school where male faculty still must be clean-shaven and neatly trimmed, it can be jarring to see students with unusual hairstyles in wild colors. However, both the students and teachers are certain that it’s been a positive — even teachers who were adamantly opposed to it not long ago.’

The writers had put things together in a way that made sense, and I gave them credit for doing their research. They backtracked the dress code changes to the Student Council, and the Student Council to that fateful March 1982 election, and that to Tom Myerson’s meddling. Tom himself came off as Memorial’s merry prankster, an educator with impeccable credentials who delighted in challenging authority. That was, pretty much, who he was, after all.

From that election, they went forward to last year’s Prom. Lizzie and Janet got coverage, but their State championship and Nationals trip received as much attention as their Prom night. Part of the point of the article was that many of the students who were the highest achievers were also out of the ordinary.

Connie got a couple of paragraphs of her own, covering her arrival in the US as a child whose parents were fleeing Vietnam, her chilly reception in other schools, and the desperation move to Memorial. That was played against her being the likely Valedictorian and a future Ivy Leaguer, and her comments on the number and depth of the friendships she’d built at Memorial.

Calvin got coverage, both as a State Champion and as the son of an NBA player. He made the point that African-Americans were rare at Memorial, but painted the issues around that as being lack of familiarity, not true prejudice. The article mentioned the likely demographic shifts as Memorial became open to more students in the district.

Jess, of course, got two paragraphs. The first started out, ‘At many schools, a head cheerleader who is also a top student, a member of Student Government, and a State Champion in Drama might be unlikely. At Memorial, it seems merely par for the course. More than anyone else, Jessica Lively points out the way Memorial’s overachievers subvert the traditional high school cliques. Over her four years at Memorial, she has probably gotten to know more people than any other student, and none of them have anything bad to say about her. In some ways, she breaks the mold merely by existing.’

The writers seemed surprised that they couldn’t find anyone who would say anything bad about Principal Riggs, either, but also made it clear that he was doing a terrific job. They played up the high number of National Merit Finalists, our unprecedented success in both sports and academic extracurriculars, and the overall cohesion of the student body.

Angie was quoted as saying, ‘Paige and I understand why our Prom night is news, but we don’t agree with it, and we hope that soon it won’t be. The history of the last hundred years is for couples with different national origins, different ethnicities, different skin tones, or different religions to go from scandalous to commonplace. Love who you love and be happy that others have found love, whoever that love might be.’

That might get her quoted. I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Phyllis Schlafly might know Angie’s name, too, before long, at this rate.

For me, they highlighted my breadth of activities, the previous Chronicle article, and the Reagan quote (which they repeated). After that, they put two quotes from very different parts of the interview together, having me say, ‘Treating high school kids as young adults pays off, as long as they live up to the expectations of being young adults. Nearly everyone at Memorial has the potential to be a leader in one way or another. To do that, we have to move forward, not live in the past.’

It worked well enough for me.

I was certain the article as a whole would make a bunch of parents happy, and worry a bunch of other parents. That was fine. We’d had this out a year ago when Carl Brandt won his school board race, explicitly standing for academics being a priority and tolerance for differences being a good thing. This year, Cam had run for re-election, and no one even bothered challenging him. The parents who wanted the schools to be enforcers of conservative values had lost, and lost fairly decisively. Memorial was hardly going to be a bastion of hippies, but it wasn’t going to be closed-minded, either.

Principal Riggs would almost certainly be happy. He’d come off as a terrific principal who everyone liked, and whose success was inarguable. No one had said anything particularly out of place. It was about the best you could expect.

We were all stunned that there was a second article. The cast picture from ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ had a caption pointing to a review of the show by the Chronicle’s theater critic. It ran in the usual theater section.

Putting it mildly, their critic was blown away. Oh, it had the usual disclaimer (which I thought was perfectly fair): ‘It is hardly fair to review a high school production — created, rehearsed, performed, and closed in less time than the typical Broadway show has previews, and by a cast for whom this is a sidelight, not a career — as one would review a Broadway production.’

Still, her review contained phrases like, ‘I would be hard-pressed to point to flaws in this production. The cast was impeccably rehearsed. From the smallest motion to the most dramatic flourishes, each actor knew who they were, what they were doing, and why they were doing it.’

She’d obviously attended the Friday performance, because her fourth paragraph said, ‘The show was marred by one thing, out of control of anyone. A heckler appeared in the back of the audience and shouted personal aspersions at the actresses currently onstage, Angela Marshall and Paige Seiler. Their reaction was a marvel. They attempted to continue, but when that was impossible, they simply froze in place until the heckler was removed, then continued as if nothing had happened, never breaking character and merely adding an ad-lib about being “rudely interrupted.”’

Of course, Jas and I got a shout out, and it came as another interesting comment. ‘As anyone who has seen ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ knows, the emotional heart of the story is the relationship between the smart but weak Albert Peterson and his long-suffering but loyal secretary and romantic partner, Rosie Alvarez. I had some doubts about a confident, polished public speaker playing Albert, but Steve Marshall immersed himself in the character. Jasmine Nguyen, meanwhile, played Rosie without changing a word, but managed to make us see Rosie as if she’d always been Vietnamese. The chemistry between the two was spot-on. But, then, they are real-life sweethearts who met through the Drama program.’

Close enough to count, probably, if not perfectly accurate.

The next paragraph, though, was one that I imagined Jess’s parents would pin up somewhere. ‘Albert and Rosie are only the emotional heart of the story, of course, because of Albert’s mother, the shrewish, overbearing Mae Peterson. In a show chock full of fresh-faced teenagers, I have to admit my doubt at casting the beauty-queen head cheerleader, who everyone loves, as Mae. Fortunately, I was wrong. Indeed, at first I suspected that I had misread the program. There was not a hint of beauty in Jessica Lively’s Mae. Somehow, without overdone makeup or effects, she simply transformed herself into a plain-looking middle-aged shrew. She was sharp, mean, and outright harrowing in a few places. Then, when the curtain came back up, and the cast took their bows, she was back to herself, none the worse for wear. Should she wish, I am certain Miss Lively — and many in the cast — could have a long and fruitful career on the stage.’