Tuesday, September 13, 2011

High School Evidential

This is proof that I made mistakes in high school. I was going through a pile of 50-year-old student newspapers looking for photos to embarrass classmates coming to our reunion this fall, and ta-da! I embarrassed myself instead. This photo is Exhibit A.  Unless you were in high school with me 50 years ago, I bet -- I hope -- you can't tell which one of these wannabe suburban rock stars is me. [You get nothing for your efforts.] 
          This picture, which also made it into the yearbook, proves that sometimes you do things in high school that are half-baked. Then somebody gets it on film and five decades later, you're toast. 
          For our yearly student produced/written/directed/choreographed show called Lagniappe [which means "a little bit extra"in Creole], two of my pals and I decided we'd be the female version of the Everly Brothers -- the Averly Sisters, get it? [Boy, I crack myself up.] For four nights, we performed the high school white girl version of Little Richard's Tutti Fruitti to a live, paying audience. On purpose. In public. For some reason, our version of the tune became a hit among the pre-teen set. And we were invited to take our performance on tour to the graduation party at one of the local middle schools. 
          Naturally, since the Scarlet Letter was part of the curriculum, we cleverly wore a scarlet letter A on our racy sweatshirts, thinking we were so tantalizingly risque with our [supposedly] oblique reference to, um, pilgrim SEX. How double entendre of us. Until somebody's dad informed us that back in the days before prohibition, a couple of shady ladies known as the Everleigh Sisters actually ran a notorious brothel in Chicago called the Everleigh Club. So without knowing it, we had doubled the value of our double entendre. 
          Somewhere there's a picture of another short-lived high school singing group I was in called The High Five -- because the five of us were all over 5'7".  At that time, "high five," as we know it today, hadn't made its way to the madras and circle pin set. But I like the idea that I may have enjoyed some very early ghetto cred, if only by accident. 
          Play that funky music, white lady.

2 comments:

GOrdon said...

Right to left? Which is you?

Mrs. L said...

Gordon -- Right to left or left to right, it doesn't matter. I'm in the middle. Gretchen Oehler, who went on to act in soaps, and later became an artist, is on the left. Ann Waterman, who sang opera in Europe and had a career as a character actress in commercials and tv is on the right. I dabbled in Second City and ultimately took the 9 to 5 route, writing ads.