I started rooting around on Facebook, looking for old high school friends. Hit paydirt. Found one guy who had "friended" a bunch of other people I had known. Well. People I had sort of known.
I knew them in junior high. I would hang around with them at school. They were actors---creative types. I thought I was part of their group. But they'd start talking about the parties they had on the weekends. They never mentioned any parties in front of me until after the fact.
I don't know how much it bothered me at the time.
There was an episode of Dragnet where a teenager crashes a party with a hand grenade: "They never invite me to their stupid parties! Turn on the music! Dance! Dance!"
That always seemed absurd to me. That and all the comedies about teenagers trying to become popular.
The school had two lunch periods. So the group arranged their schedules so they'd all have second lunch so they could hang around together. They somehow neglected to tell me. I ended up with first lunch.
Now where are they
Well. They all look old now. All seem to be fairly successful. They were bourgeois to begin with. Half of them had university professors for parents. There's not much social mobility in America, up or down. I'm surprised at the careers some of them chose. One was an actor in high school, part of that clique. Now works on rural water planning.
Another one started out in high school as an actor type, then he became a conservative columnist on the school paper. Said we should all be drafted. He wanted mandatory military service. He thought teenagers owed it to America---he didn't say why. Of course, he never joined the army himself. He didn't spell it out in his profile, but I think he's gay now.
There was another one. Runs a graphic design business in Europe. His father was an architect. Their house he designed was featured in a national magazine in the '70s but is terribly dated now. His parents were bourgeois creative types. They did things like they gave him a hundred bucks a year to invest in the stock market when he was in grade school. A hundred dollars then was worth several hundred now.
In high school, his parents apparently gave him about a thousand bucks to make a movie. That was in the late '70s. Shot in 16mm. A short film. Not really worth it. He and his friends stole routines from Monty Python and old Rainer Beer commercials. The film went over quite well at the school talent show. Kids today would shoot it on video and not think twice about it---back then, it was a major undertaking.
And there was another guy...
He's bald now. I'll call him "AP". He was an actor in high school. He starred in every play the school put on.
I had a friend who kept trying out for plays and was either rejected or got small roles. My friend lived in a run down rental house with his single mother. He was angry that AP got his choice of roles in every single production.
One time, AP and his wealthy family were touring Europe during the tryouts. Fine! My friend tried out for a role thinking he had a chance now! But AP came back long after the try-outs were done, and the stinking teacher STILL cast him in the lead.
Now that rich bastard is running a theater, directing, writing plays. There's a lot about him on the internet. Doing a lot of plays based on the work of an Israeli author. Turns out he's friends with Stephen Colbert. There was an article which presented him as a colorful character because he went to a library housing rare books and he casually flipped through the pages of a centuries-old copy of a work by Shakespeare. Those frumpy old librarians failed to recognize his genius and stopped him from damaging it.
At least the high school drama teacher got what he deserved: Unemployment. They cut that rotten bastard's job.
It turned out that the teacher was a movie actor himself! Appeared in what by all accounts was a TERRIBLE low budget "western". About an environmentally conscious cowboy who rides around on a buffalo. The cowboy goes into a saloon. The other cowboys pick on him because he rides a buffalo. So a fight starts and the buffalo comes in and beats up the bad cowboys.
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