Lion and Magic Boy

I have been remiss.

I have forsaken you for the allure of the almighty dollar. That’s right, I have been using my precious blogging time to rack up some pretty nice posts over at Babble, if I do say so myself. So, shameless self-promotion? Why, yes!

Here’s one of my favorites, about the need for play, even as parents.

You go read that, and then come back.

I’ll wait.

[tapping foot impatiently]

Hey!!!

Don’t be getting distracted over there!

[wheedling tone] Don’t you want to hear a cringeworthy story about my awkward teen moments?

Ha. I knew that would bring you back.

Okay then.

Am I supposed to change the names here? Hmm. I will consider that. Meanwhile, ponder this:

I have mentioned before that I believe in reincarnation. Part of this belief extends to the one that says that we plan certain elements of our lives before we live that life. In other words, we choose parents, mates, and others, and we choose challenges or issues to exist between us or to be presented in the course of these relationships. So when I say that I have received information that the overriding purpose of the relationship I am about to describe was to set a pattern for my subsequent relationships, you know where I am coming from.

Scott was not handsome. In fact, he was rather an “odd duck”, a phrase uttered by an old boss of mine many years ago that has always stuck with me because I rather like it. He was a year ahead of me in school, a junior to my sophomore. His younger sister was in my grade and we were not quite friends but more than acquaintences. I was vaguely aware of Scott as his sister’s older brother, but didn’t think much about him beyond that.

Until One Day, when he walked with me around the track around the football field and regaled me with his dream of owning a pink hearse. I am pretty sure he was saying this to impress me.

Not long afterward, he appeared at a cast party from a play I was in and we stayed and talked and eyed one another. Soon we were going to movies. Well, A Movie. I even remember what I wore: A light-blue terrycloth short-sleeved top. And I had just had my hair permed and I imagined I looked like Julie Christie in Heaven Can Wait, which if you haven’t seen I can’t help you beyond telling you that it was supposed to create an effect of a soft blonde halo around my head. Okay. Moving on. Now understand that I was then 15 and had yet to go on an actual date. I had been kissed before, once at a skating rink and later in an even more cringeworthy situation that may or may not ever appear here, but my point is that my romantic notions were taken from the pages of Little Women and maybe from Hallmark commercials.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that this date turned into an obsession on my part, and when his idea about what our relationship was apparently didn’t match mine (I had let him, uh, touch me! In, uh, places! Weren’t we, like, engaged now?) I had no choice but to write him pining and whining letters, listen to the soundtrack from “Grease” on the radio and my pathetic “The Best of Bread” album all summer while listlessly doing jigsaw puzzles and playing pingpong with my brother and waiting for Scott to call so my life could begin again.

I did see him a few more times that summer but I finally got the hint after a trip to an amusement park where Scott spent more time talking with a girl running one of the rides than he did with me and later remarked that it was just like the song “Magnet and Steel”, a reference that I never fully understood, but took it to mean that he was just a player.

So I pulled myself together and began my junior year with a bang, wearing on the first sweltering day of school a corduroy skirt suit with brown leather boots and a hat. It was my preppie year and I often appeared at school looking like a junior VP of an accounting firm, ready to extend my Dale Carnegie handshake to anyone.

This apparent change in my demeanor did not go unnoticed by Scott, and by the end of the month we were a couple, which lasted through the fall and winter, through all the performances of our play “The Crucible”, past Christmas when I did not receive the engagement or even the promise ring that somehow I had convinced myself would appear, and until right about Valentine’s Day on which he took me to the appallingly horrific movie “Ice Castles”, after which he told me he wanted to date someone else and by the way he was breaking up with me.

Devastated, I threw myself into my modeling career and into the upcoming production of “Oklahoma”, where I had been named Laurey’s understudy in order to force the preferred Laurey (I was the better actor but she had a stronger voice) to choose between cheerleading and the play. I was totally being used and I knew it, but felt I had no choice and at least I got to rehearse “Surrey With the Fringe on Top” a few times with the dreamy Curly who everybody had a crush on.

Re-enter Scott, disillusioned perhaps about the allure of the girl he had wanted to date, a little miffed at seeing me with a social life, and STUPID ME goes right back and even allows herself to be talked into doing unmentionable things under a blanket that fooled no one on the choir bus trip to Oregon (“blue balls”? I can’t believe I fell for that one), plus further unmentionable things later that summer after he had graduated and had nothing to lose after which which my diary entry said something like: “I am a woman now.”

Then Scott went off to college and I fell into a new world with new friends who ingested illegal substances and soon I couldn’t care less about my Econ final or getting into Bryn Mawr or Mt. Holyoke or Smith or Wellesley, and Scott became to me kind of a pathetic whining loser-guy. The shoe was on the other foot and I couldn’t get away fast enough.

I could have learned a lot from this experience but instead I doomed myself to keep repeating it for quite a long time. So, thanks, Scott, you did your job well. I don’t hold it against you, and in fact I kind of wonder where you are now, what your life has been like. I hope it’s been good.