Wow, lots going on on this spread.
Wednesday
The secret writing says:
I talked to Gaby! I talked to Gaby! We finally got a chance to talk in a serious context. I was right, she's a lot like me. She's afraid of emotion and of talking to people. Hope we start to talk more often.
And thus starts a rather tortured chapter in my life. Gaby and I had a love-hate relationship that brewed like a storm for months, blew up periodically and left all sorts of damage in its wake. After many years of not talking, we became friends again in recently, though we don't see much of each other thanks to our busy lives. She'll pop up all over the place in 1954 for the next few months, so I won't get too deep into it now. I'll talk about it as it goes -- let's just savor this moment when it was exciting enough to merit musical notes around secret writing.
"I LIKE IT!" —Faust
Oh man. That was a bad scene. West Side Story-related: during rehearsals, things got a bit heated between Faust, our director, and some of the leads or dancers (I don't remember anymore), and the bickering went on for awhile until Faust shouted that line so loud it echoed through the auditorium and silenced everyone. Whatever he wanted, that's how it went.
The unfinished figure on this page and the next were sketches for one of a series of etchings I was working on in printmaking. I didn't end up going with this pose -- it was too static, and hard to get the bent-knee lean to look right.
Thursday
Jeff G. was one of the class outcasts. He was very smart ("bookwise" anyway) but very uptight and pissy. He was a scold, too, and had a whiny, nasal voice, which didn't help. The guy was really unlikable. He claimed to be far smarter than his parents -- he claimed he did their taxes every year -- and the rumor was that he'd killed a puppy when he was a child. (Doubt that was true, but he never denied it very convincingly.)
Underneath it all, he was extremely self-conscious and had been picked on for years, so he'd built this mean persona as a defensive mechanism. When you got him off his defenses, he turned out to be really insecure and seeking of approval. He purposefully didn't have his picture in the yearbook, ever. I felt bad for him, but it was so late in our high school career and, frankly, I saw little up side to befriending him and helping him out of his shell. That was going to take years of intensive therapy.
There was this freshman kid in one of my open periods who we nicknamed "Micropymp." He wore a black leather trenchcoat and fancy black leather boots every day and had sort of greaser styled hair, and was constantly working an angle on a couple of Latina girls at a nearby lunch table, so we openly mocked him. He mostly took it in stride, but occasionally he asked us why we called him that. Here's one of those exchanges. By the way, it's pymp with a "y" for some convoluted reason I no longer remember except that it was somehow related to "womyn." Yep.
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