"This one time, in Lit-Mag...",

Thursday's Writer's Prompt

from

Mama Kat's

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"This One Time, In Lit-Mag...." 

- The way I was in High School.

Whether or not you've seen American Pie, or any of it's sequels, you've heard the phrase "this one time, at band camp..."

I've always been an extrovert -from the day I was born, I've been...out there. In a lot of ways, I still feel the same as I did in high school. I sometimes look at myself in the mirror and am shocked that I'm nearly 30, instead of 15. I still fear mediocrity, and I still have a lot of the same passions.

I love the theatre, and I did then too. I also loved to write.

I think I had a minor identity crisis going on in high school, and possibly a little depression, but then, I mean, who doesn't, right? We're all trying to figure ourselves out. What we like, what we don't, what do we want to be when we "grow up", not to mention, the absolute horror that IS the teen years.

I survived my self-search party by spending days in the Literary Magazine room, and my nights rehearsing for plays and musicals.

(That's me with the long hair, and the white sweater. Brandon, my now bald husband, is the one with 2 dozen palm tree ponytails in his hair. Don't worry...he's done a LOT of growing up.) 

Surrounded by other kids who were as creative, and, a lot of them, as lost as I was gave me a spot- a place where I fit in.

No one took more of  a chance on me than did our teacher, "Mr. Long" who constantly put up with our pranks, which included desks hung from the ceiling, Latin phrases written in white out pen across the wall and on the bottom of our desks, flat Dr. Pepper in place of his morning coffee,  wordlessly lining up to follow the office aid out of his classroom and throughout the school, among many other crazy antics. He spent hours teaching us how to publish our wonderful, award winning high school Literary Magazine (Lit-Mag), Chasms. How to fill it full of lovely poetry, prose, photography, and other artistic features. Even better, he taught us to MAKE that art, and best of all, he accepted all of us.

Walt Whitman wrote, in Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass, "...I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world." 

Mr. Long, and "Mama Squires"- the AP English teacher in the classroom next door- taught us the meaning of being "not a bit tamed" and how to YAWP. How to live, how to just be us. I don't think he knows he had that kind of effect of us. 

I think it took me until I was married for 5 years or so to really figure out how to be comfortable in my own skin- to love my body, not because it's perfect, but because it's mine, and because "beautiful" and "perfect" is relative and varied. It took me another 10 years after graduating high school to figure out that people, like ogres, are like onions- they have layers.

I only recently learned that people change. That people I only knew of in high school could become good friends later. People that I thought were permanent threads in my life could be severed.

Still, all those years in my personal Purgatory, full of locker shelves, teenage angst, sob-fests on the couch in the Lit Mag room, sluffing assemblies- again in the Lit Mag room, and more diva-offs than that Drama club could supply on it's own, put me on the path to figuring all that stuff out. Not because it was the end all be all of my cognitive abilities, but because high school just took everything I already knew, and dumped it out on the floor, and insisted that I put it all back together, piece by piece.

(I'm the redhead front and center in the red skirt and green shirt) 

And still, whenever I get together with my old friends, our conversation is riddled with that same old statement..."This one time, in LitMag...."

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