This past weekend was the 30th anniversary of the reincarnation of a wonderful and quirky place I love dearly. Bettie Page, Dinah Shore & my grandfather count as some of the alumni pre-magnetization. Hume-Fogg High School is like an inside joke... You just had to be there. Kim Green did an amazing job of translating our collective experience in this written piece and the accompanying video. My Hume-Fogg era was the best of times, but it was not the best time of my life—because even a happy high school experience should never be as good as life gets. It should, ideally, be the opening passages of a book you can’t bear to put down, an inciting incident that moves your story forward, inexorably, to a life of epic intellectual adventure. I owe everyone there so much, but for one thing, I owe you everything: you gave me a place where I finally started feeling comfortable being the whole version of myself. I no longer had to be just the girl that read constantly and asked for more homework OR pretend that I was dumb so that the fact that I loved organizing spirit weeks and homecomings wouldnt be so bizarre to people. I could want all things and that was totally ok. I could think differently than everyone I had ever met and that was just fine, too (as long as I backed it up with reason and proof). So just a shout out of love and thanks to some of the people whose influence has been greater than you can realize (and thanks for putting up with me when I was a pain in the rear!) Thomas T Ward, Allan Kaplan, Martha Brown Murphree, Bill Brown, Paul Fleming, Mary Ann Jetton, Lois Adkinson and so many more. PS: I KNEW that secretly the teachers must have felt this way! Haha... well played. Alan Kaplan: And pretty soon, we had a curriculum that would’ve choked a horse! I mean, it was incredible! And You guys just did it! It was, “Ooookaay! And you did it!” And it was like, “Whoa! They’re actually doing this stuff!” It was amazing to watch. It’s a miracle that we didn’t kill more of you. I mean it really is. You know, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but we did some cruel and unusual things to you that we would never have done to students at other schools. And you did them and you did them well, and that just amazed us. We were delighted.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 07:24:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015