To My Aspiring Young Jedi Friend: Google Not-- Do

I have a new friend. He doesn't know me, and well, I don't really know him, either.

But the vision that has evolved of him over the past few days has warmed my heart.

He is a Google searcher, who has gone to my post, The "Force This!: Jedi Simulation Correspondence Course" four times now. And for three of those times, he has used the following set of keywords:

"how to get the force in you like a real jedi"

I love him. And I don't know what I love more, the "how to get the force in you" or the heavy, optimistic implications of "like a REAL jedi."

I picture this eight-year-old boy who's devoted himself to Jedi research, hoping to best his besties over the summer by coming back to school in Fall sporting a serious Jedi mind trick.

Will Moose Martin be giving him swirlies again in the boys' room come September?

Will Reed and Harrison, Jr. and Big Andre be cornering him in the lunchroom and stealing his SunnyD again?

And will Mr. Renfrew be lecturing him on sitting still in class even though he has a note from his mom about the ADD and the peanut allergies and everything?

No. Because he will have uncovered the secrets to getting the Force in him like a real Jedi.

And he knows, if the information were out there to show him how to unlock ancient, mystical intergalactic powers, there could be only one place you would find it:

Through Google.

So you can imagine my delight when after witnessing his two days of relentless searching, I saw my wonderful new friend had amended his search to try to get more specific results:

"what does the force look like on your hand like a jedi"

Because, as any kid knows, having the wrong hand gesture is the only thing that stands between us and proper superpowers.

I mean, I recall knowing deep in my soul that the reason I could not explode in a flaming ball of special effects and come out wearing my superheroic Wonder Woman outfit was because I was not spinning around properly.

It was either not fast enough, not slow enough, my balance was off... something. I just wasn't doing it right. Otherwise, right now I would be typing this from my Invisible Jet.

(The Jet has wireless these days. C'mon, you know it.)

This is kid logic, and it fills my soul with joy. It is the essence of summer. The days of long hikes, and good friends, and magic, and playing pretend. It is a glimpse into a world I didn't quite think existed any more.

Perhaps it does, only now it's supported by online research.

So to my new friend, I say, have fun but don't forget to embrace the inner-Jedi you already have inside... Through your quest, you have proven to be resourceful and determined, qualities that will help you well in life on this planet.

And if, instead, you happen to be a 30-year-old man living in your mother's basement, please-- don't tell me. I never did perfect that Wonder Woman spin; I don't think I could take another big disappointment.

Trick-or-Treat Bag of Halloween Humor

October: the time of year the witches set aside their Swiffer Wetjets for more traditionally seasonal modes of flying transit... 

Those bright, crisp days before the carved pumpkins begin to sag, sink and soggily sway like drunken old men on every doorstep...

The time of year I realize how many Halloween humor posts I've written since I started blogging, and that newer readers haven't gotten a chance to check them out!

So if you're looking for a few holiday cackles, a dollop of zombie fun, a resurrection of 80's childhood nostalgia and maybe even a few otherworldly groans, look no further than our list below! Click a title to find your frightening funny.

All That is Zombie

• T'was The Night Before Halloween, Plus Zombies (My Shaun of the Dead Sequel Poem). What happens when Shaun pays a trip to visit an American friend and finds himself in a mall full of the Undead? And where do you buy a good cricket bat?

• Rip Slaughter: Zombie for Hire. An original example of the Film Noir Zombie Detective genre. Okay, there probably isn't a genre that specific yet. But maybe there will be.

• Ten Signs Your Neighbor is a Zombie. You know you worry about these things.

• New!: The Anti-Zombie Bra from Ashley's Armoire. Do you want to be Evil Dead, or Evil Drop Dead Gorgeous? Defend yourself the stylish way through this exciting new product available from Ashley's Armoire.

Halloween in 80s Kiddom

• Nightmare on Sesame Street Part One. Take one talented seamstress mom, two tons of fiberfill, and a tube of window caulking and what do you get? Halloween immobility and award-winning costuming all-in-one. 

• Nightmare on Sesame Street Part Two. The mean streets of Jersey prove trick-or-treating is a dangerous game, and not just because Mrs. Martin's been giving out the same bag of Milk Duds for five years.

• Halloween on the Doll Lady's Doorstep. An eccentric neighbor with an obsession with dead-eyed dollies as outdoor decor made for triple-dog-dare worthy childhood moments.

Hope you enjoy 'em-- They're sugar and razor-blade free!

My Life as a Junior High Heavy Metal Rockstar

"So, how's that heavy metal band going?" Fig Newton, self-appointed class clown (you can read about his ongoing War of Wills with one substitute teacher here) had turned his chair to me, Cheshire grin on his face.

I liked Fig. His jokes never ventured into that truly mean territory that some kids' tended to. But I also knew enough to sense danger ahead. Y'know, like livestock seem to know a thunderstorm is coming.

Heavy metal?! In that moment, I tried to recall my current musical work. To-date it had involved eight years of tedious piano lessons where I tried desperately to squeeze even mild Billy Joel tunes into an otherwise rigid classical repertoire...

And the rest of it was all about school band flute-tooting, where the closest we got to rocking out was Neil Diamond's "America."

We took what we could get.

"Um..." I suavely stalled for time.

"You and Josette," Fig went on to explain. "Your heavy metal band. 'Thorson and Hadley.' I hear it's getting really big."

"Ohhh!" I said, light dawning over my mental schoolyard. Now I saw where we were going with this. This was supposed to be humor. See, because my best friend since the beginning of time, Josette Hadley and I were both big ol' nerds. Quiet, and good students, and hopelessly awkward....

Josette was a nervous kid because she'd had so friggin' many CCD classes she'd gotten the idea she was treading a fine line to Hell with pretty much breathing the wrong way.

I had the unfortunate curse of being the only child of strict, distinctly-unamused perfectionists where even my most minor toe out of line was viewed as a horrifying reflection on their failure in the whole unspoken Exceptional Parent Competition they seem to have signed up for...

None of my classmates knew these specific pressures, mind you. But they could smell fear. Sort of like sharks to blood in the water. It couldn't be helped. It was Nature's Law.

So this all was supposed to be hilarious because the banging of the heads, we did not so much do.

"They have a heavy metal band," Fig confidentially told two of the boys around him. "Thorson and Hadley, it's called. They really rock."

"Um, sure," I said, flatly, "the gigs-- they just keep coming." I went back to doodling hearts and Garfields in my Trapper Keeper notebook.

And so began the rise of this new and rather eccentric running joke among my classmates. During the day, Josette and I were introverted goody-two-shoes junior high students...

During evenings and weekends, though, we were leather-clad hard core rockers who gave Joan Jett, Heart, AC/DC and Yngwie Malmsteen a run for their money.

The shift came somewhere into about the third day of this (because in school situations, what is funny one moment is, of course, well-worth repeating word-for-word a bazillion times to infinity).

So seeing that this theme could easily run clear into summer vacation and possibly follow us for the rest of our lives, being something we'd have to try to smooth over with potential employers-- ("no, I never did bite the head off a chicken") -- Josette and I got an idea.

And we went to work.

"Here," I handed Fig a slice of spiral bound notebook paper. I even had gone to the trouble to trim those little fringy things off, so he knew it was important.

"What's this?" He held it, frowning.

"Read it."

In big letters on the top of the paper was a logo. We'd toyed with this, oh, for a good hour or two. Which in kid-time is really years. Trying out different variations. Little nuances. Eventually we'd settled on writing "Thorson" in jagged 80s KISS-style lettering, and "Hadley" all in capital letters. Because, since my name was first, y'know, hers should be in caps. To show equal importance.

We were determined not to have any control and ego issues break up our band like McCartney and Lennon... David Lee Roth and Van Halen... erm, Simon and Garfunkel.

Instead of a traditional "and" we showed our rebellious heavy metal nature by using a separating lightning bolt.

Oh, it was so very cool, we were sure.

Below this masterpiece of branding, was a song list. Twelve song titles, from the first Thorson/HADLEY album.

These titles were as repulsive and violent as we could think to make them. Which, of course, wasn't very. But we gave it our all. Edgy! Raw! Involving pain and stench even, which we thought was a particularly nice touch.

Oh, we had stepped onto the stage and strummed the first grinding electric chord of a whole new age in junior high school life!

Fig passed the paper around to his buddies, the ones who had been helping perpetuate the theme. As long as it had taken me to get the initial joke, it took them to realize Josette and I had decided to embrace it.

Next in our work were the lyrics pages. Lyrics fleshing out all of those vulgar song titles. We were nerds, after all, so one thing you could certainly count on nerds to do properly-- particularly girl nerds who excelled in Language Arts-- was to write decent rhyme.

Oh, we made the songs ridiculously silly, incredibly spoofy, and shared those, too, with the masses.

Then came the promo posters. We were Artsy Nerds, yes, so promotional literature could be whipped up in no-time!

Our school book covers brandished our logo and information about our tours. We had rave reviews written up. Soon, everyone knew about Thorson/HADLEY. Our heavy metal infamy extended throughout junior high and well into high school, until it had absolutely just nowhere else to go.

We had peaked at 18, like so many child stars.

Sometimes, now as an adult, when I find myself once again being thrown into the role of responsible, reliable goody-two-shoes, I find myself longing for my headbanging past. Those days so free, so full of beautiful music with words like "reek" and "puke" in it... And of course the fame...

Oh, the fame...

But, at least these golden days of glory were immortalized. In various spots, in the 1989 Edgar Allen Poe High School Year Book, you will see it printed there-- a message for us graduating seniors to remember always:

Thorson/HADLEY RULEZZZZ!

You can take the girl out of the 80s big hair, but you never quite take the 80s big hair out of the girl.

The Great Jersey Kiddom Nature Experience

Jumping off the roof... Biking 'till ya barf as a test of physical endurance... Breaking the land-speed record for downhill sledding until being formally introduced to a tree...

These were all things one of my friends and I detailed recently as very real, once entirely logical past-times of Kiddom.

Ah, Kiddom. That time when virtually anything seemed possible, and sharp boundaries of good judgment often took on a somewhat hazy, more Guideline-oriented position in our enthusiastic, still-developing brains.

I suspect the brains of my friend Sarah and I had been stunted due to one of these boundary issues. If not before one particular day, certainly afterward.

Sarah had lived down the street from me for Practically All of My Life. Which was to say, a couple of years.

And at the very end of her housing complex, at the far back of a long winding drive, was the closest most of us New Jersey-born city kids ever came to Nature...

It was a small park by a brook.

Oh, the park wasn't anything to speak of. It had two metal creatures on springs you could bounce on-- at least until the summer sun got too hot, would heat 'em up until transparent waves reached the power lines, and they'd sizzle our shorts-clad thighs like flabby grilled cheese sandwiches.

There was a circular board on a reluctant lazy-susan type apparatus. Where, with enough energy, you could get to speeds of upwards 1/4 mile an hour. We were more likely to pass out of exhaustion from the effort rather than the thrill.

There was a rusty jungle gym, which soon became just a little too low for us to enjoy in any particular Tarzan antics.

And there were a set of swings, which squeaked their plea for oil the moment you looked at 'em.

Sarah and I liked the swings well enough. But we actually preferred the metal safety bars in front of them. They were designed to keep non-swinging spectators a sensible distance back. But we found them ideal for practicing Olympic-style uneven bars routines.

It was just as Sarah was going for the Gold one day, that I noticed the drops of blood on the ground below her. Sarah was one of those kids who got nosebleeds practically on schedule. I was sure there was a paper on her fridge at home that read:

• Home from school
• Homework
• Snack
• Nosebleed

Well, normally we were at Sarah's house the times her daily Nasal Leeching would begin. But with us out there in the midst of Nature-- a whole 15 minute walk from her house-- well, we weren't about to head home just because of Old Faithful.

No, we decided we would instead find something to sop up the bleeding.

And my, didn't those giant leaves over there by the little brook look handy?

We moved in closer for examination. Or rather, we both moved in-- but Sarah had her head elevated, so I examined. The leaves were beautiful. Great crinkled prehistoric-looking things on long stalks. Something straight out of Land of the Lost. A quick moment of discussion, and we ripped one off and Sarah pressed it to her leaking facial feature. It was working! We had done it! How resourceful we were!

Until we noticed the smell.

We learned later that this beautiful leaf, this fine example of botany was, in fact, Skunk Cabbage. And its stench which-- if we had been truly honest with ourselves, probably smelled no worse than we did as we radiated Olympic sweat and spilled soured Yoo-hoo from lunch-- sent us fleeing into the gently babbling brook.

Sarah began to wash her face, ewwing and shrieking as only a pre-teen girl could. And it was there, in the greenly leaf-dappled light, in the world of waterbugs and mossy rocks and the occasional oily rainbow swirling along the water, it was there we became very thirsty.

And we decided to drink of Nature's Bounty. We'd seen them do just like this on Little House on the Prairie. And Mr. Ingalls would never steer us wrong.

Well, when we arrived back at Sarah's, it didn't take much to determine we'd been up to something. Blood still traced around Sarah's neck. Leafy green stains still smeared her nose and freckled cheeks. Our shoes squelched. Our socks sagged damply around our ankles. Mud dotted our calves.

And in moments, the story unraveled of how yes, Sarah had had another nosebleed but we had completely taken care of it. We were wholly self-sufficient. We mopped up the blood and even enjoyed a nice little drink from the stream.

"Er, which stream?"

"The one by the park."

Here we learned a new word: contaminants. And that our region of Jersey was one of the largest pharmaceutical and chemical producers in the state. And how that particular creek stretched for miles, in and around this amazing mecca of export, until it eventually dumped into the Lackawanna River along the railroad tracks not far from my house.

A phone call brought this little geographic and manufacturing trivia to the attention of my own mother. Who made me promise never to drink from the stream or any other non-faucet water source again.

And I couldn't be sure, but Mom seemed to survey me more closely that evening at dinner.

It wasn't with anger, necessarily. Just this uneasy, furtive evaluation.

In retrospect I think I now know what she was looking for. She was searching for signs of a third eye, the bud of an 11th finger. Or skunk cabbage leaves to sprout from my ears.

This was North Central Jersey Nature, after all. You never could be too sure. Nature, we knew, worked in mysterious ways.

Putting the Boo in Bamboo

Tree Fear. I was reminded of this dark, chlorophyllic time in Kiddom by a recent post of Kathy, over at the Junk Drawer.

It seems her sunflowers are stalking her, growing unnaturally large entirely too quickly, in their unholy mission to... I don't know... peer in her windows and watch her funk dancing to Nelly.

And suddenly, the image of these sunflowers—waiting... lurking... drooling dry-roasted seeds, even—it took me back to my own leafy, yet funk-free, toddler terror: the slathering, vegetative monster I'd dubbed, "Bamboo."

See, somehow, at about age four, I'd been allowed to watch the horror film Day of the Triffids. (Yes, I know, I know... but it was the 70s. Nobody worried about kid trauma in the 70s. We also ate lead paint chips and rode in the front seat on our mom's lap unseatbelted while juggling knives. You lose little Timmy to a tragic riding-while-knife-juggling accident? Just make sure you have a spare kid, no big deal. Things are different today.)

Anyway, Day of the Triffids is a 60s monster flick where alien spores from a meteor shower grow into man-eating trees, which uproot themselves for some Human Slurpee take-out.

And while modern viewers might see the film as a metaphor for the Red Scare and yadda-yadda-yadda... what my teeny tot brain got out of the film was that our nation's friendly forests actually had an insidious plan. To lure us in with shade, and nuts, and something nifty to climb...

Then drain us like K-Mart ICEE machines.

From this, you can probably tell my contact with Actual Nature was not exactly often. I mean, I was from north-central New Jersey. Aside from the potted plants at the mall, Actual Nature only came in any sort of bulk on the annual camping trip to Cape May...

The place where my Tree Fear branched out.

I look now at the campground's web site and feel an ironic chuckle bubble up:

Our wooded park will provide you with the pleasures of the forest, yet you're only minutes away from the beaches and oceans that have made our area famous.

Yeah, pleasure of the forest, all right. Like the grasping tree branches tap, tap, tapping on the roof of the Dodge Family Wagon, where I lay in the overhead bunk bed. Just an inch of fiberglass between me and being sycamore-slurped.

So I named my foliagey fear "Bamboo." To little kid ears, it had all the sound-effects of terror wrapped into its very word. "Bam!": it sneaks up and gets you. "Boo!": well, y'know... just "boo." To a little kid brain, "Boo" gave it the extra edge.

I did not know from gently swaying Japanese garden plants and Zen.

Anyway, my poor parents learned the hard way of my fear of this carnivorous deciduous. During our first thunderstorm at the campgrounds, as coastal winds began to whip, rattle and twist the objects of my concerns, I made my neurosis known with a certain amount of... um... flair.

"Bamboo's comin'... Bamboo's comin'..." I uttered, whimpering and rocking-- probably not wholly unlike the token creepy child in any horror flick of the era.

It was good I was keeping up with the trends.

The parents, well, they finally got out of me what the issue was though a series of 20-questions, followed by some blame tossing about who left Day of the Triffids on...

And then they stacked "Bamboo" into my Fear Pile along with:

• "Concerns I will slip through the cracks of the boardwalk and drown in the ocean below"
  
• "Concerns I will go down the drain with the bathwater"
  
• "Concerns I will be eaten by the skeletons on the Pirates of the Caribbean Ride"
• And mayonnaise.

I'm okay on the first three these days.

But, alas, mayo. (shudder) Give me a man-eating tree any day!

So tell me-- do you recall being afraid of something in particular as a kid? Or do your kids have a fear that simply makes you scratch your head?

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The Regrettable Third Grade Boobie Extravaganza

When your dad's a biologist, your childhood might just be a bit... different... than everyone else's.

Oh, you won't necessarily notice it in-between A-Team episodes and Crayola 64-packs.

But as an adult, you might just look back on your first years on this planet-- cringe-- and wonder how you went so far astray.

Such was the Third Grade Boobie Extravaganza.

Yup, where most parents were happy enough if little Rodney just colored in the lines, and didn't pick his nose in the school play, my dad had other priorities.

Things which, as a biologist, he found oh-so-adorable coming from a little person. But which pretty much put a giant red target on my big bespectacled noggin.

I was, for instance, the only 7-year-old who had to call horseshoe crabs at the beach by their Latin name.

And let me tell you, when your Limulus polyphemus innocently slips out in class, it does not make you the girl everyone wants to sit next to at lunch.

Now, I mention all this, because it was this line of thinking that transformed one carefree artistic moment into what we shall call my "Boobie Enlightenment Period. " I recall vividly how it began.

I was sitting on the floor of my grandpa's house in Florida on summer vacation, drawing mermaids. Red-haired mermaids, blond mermaids, brunettes... Mermaids with blue tails, purple tails...

No Crayola left behind.

And my father, watching this for some time, determined that the real problem with my drawing style was not my derivative over-use of a Warhol-esque repetitive theme...

Nope. It was that my mermaid collection violated the laws of proper anatomy. If I were ever going to be an artist of any caliber-- y'know, and not be washed up by age eight-- I really needed to pay more attention to detail, the Pop explained.

And thus, the first pair o' boobs entered into the picture.

Or actually, all of the pictures. Yup, from here on out, it was a veritable Boobie Renaissance in my artistic endeavors. From Nancy Drew to Wonder Woman and everyone in-between... if it was a female character and I drew it, you could guarantee, she had a pair.

And while this appeased the Pop regarding my maturing artistic sensibilities, I discovered once I hit third grade-- as in many an art movement-- it didn't quite translate to the masses like I'd hoped.

Unlike second grade, the third grade classroom, inside and out, had a number of bulletin boards we kids were allowed to decorate and maintain. And so for every season, we crafted a scene using our own hand-made cut outs.

You can probably tell where this is going.

Oh, my friend Josette did a snowman and kids throwing snowballs. Lance Helgerberger drew a couple of boys on a sled. And me, I drew a pirouetting ice skater...

With sweater-clad knockers Lana Turner would have been proud of.

My teacher, Miss Andros, a sweet prim maiden lady, blinked befuddled at the image and struggled noticeably about just how to tactfully address this booby-trapped situation. So she pointed. "Jenni, now you see these here... um..."

But then I explained to her, yes, I was aware of them. And how being anatomically accurate was important if you were ever to really learn to draw properly.

Mumbling and patting my shoulder, she found her argument suddenly flaked away like Elmer's paste.

And so third grade became the year I introduced my classmates to the joys of fine art. I can just imagine now, at Parent-Teacher Conferences, Miss Andros pointing out the bulletin boards and asking my mother if she could pick my contributions out of a crowd.

Oh yes, Miss Andros. She could...

She most certainly could.

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Brook-Bagging Louie Stamoolis

As a bully, Dwayne Pasternak was an underachiever.

Oh, he probably could have gotten good at it, if he'd just applied himself a little more. But on a scale of Bullying as an Artform, his work was like a Starving Artist painting...

Unoriginal... Cheap.... Initially getting your attention, but eventually just blending in behind the sofa.

He was the kid who'd call you "dogface," if you just happened to look his way. The one who'd trip you on your way to class so you'd drop your books. The boy who'd snap your bra.

I always felt his repertoire lacked range.

I mean, Teeny DeLuca, now she'd shown first-rate creativity when she tried to give me lead poisoning. And Arnold Kosninski, he used skilled spin-doctoring to enrage his victims. But Dwayne, well, he'd never make into the Bully Hall of Fame... His lack of imagination held him back.

Until he decided to brook-bag a kid named Louie Stamoolis.

Louie Stamoolis was a seventh-grade human computer... input and output. His math was of Texas Instruments quality. He remembered dates and events like he lived them. He even seized foreign languages like Napoleon did countries. Louie was brilliant.

But because Louie was storing all of this data in his brain, regrettably, it left very little room for anything else. Like manners... modesty... or a sense of humor. And the giant weight of his brain also seemed to press on the back of his eyes, straining his tear ducts.

Louie Stamoolis could cry at the drop of a hat.

It didn't even have to be his hat.

Add to that, he was small for his age, with an almost pretty face, and long dark lashes. He was a target for his intelligence, his looks, and because he was a little bit hard to like.

The crying only made it worse.

So, one day as school let out, I was headed on home and spied Dwayne Pasternak playing keep-away with Louie's backpack.

Dwayne was tall, wiry, and with a straw-colored flat top. With his plaid flannel shirt and that scrub-brush hair, he looked like a scarecrow teetering in the wind-- the book bag dangling high over Louie's head.

Louie's pale face was streaming with tears and he'd jump. And miss. And sob. And jump again. And whimper.

"You want it?" laughed Dwayne, "Come get it. Or consider yourself brook-bagged, Stamoolis!"

Brook-bagging meant tossing someone's backpack into the stream that ran outside the school. Many a text book and homework went the way of the brook. Teachers knew papers turned in with crinkled and smeared pages had probably been resurrected from a serious brook-bagging.

Well, at the very threat of it, Louie Stamoolis' tearducts started working overtime. And that's when I heard a bored, irritated voice say, "Aww, just give him his stupid bag back, Dwayne."

Oh. That voice was mine.

Dwayne fixed his attention on me, with a look of vague recognition like, "Hey, hadn't I bullied you before?"

But strangely, Dwayne didn't really scare me. What was he going to do to me? Snap my bra again? Call me ugly for the umpteenth time? By eighth grade, I'd seen it all, and survived to tell about it. But picking on Louie Stamoolis... that was like flipping a turtle on its back to see it struggle.

Someone had to take the side of the turtle.

"You stay out of this," Dwayne snarled.

"C'mon, Dwayne. It's not cool. Just give it to him," I said.

And that's when Dwayne started racing down the hallway.

I looked to see what Louie planned to do about it. But he just leaned against the lockers, sobbing like Joan Crawford trying for an Oscar. So maybe it was a lack of fear. Or maybe I'd just watched too many Wonder Woman episodes. But I left Louie in the middle of his big scene-- and ran after Dwayne.

Now, Dwayne wasn't really expecting to be chased-- let alone by a girl. Down the metal stairs we went, one after the other, with a clatter like thunder.

Bang! went the school doors and out onto the sidewalk we flew. Dwayne sprinted. I sprinted, too. And that's when, true to his underachieving nature, Dwayne lost all initiative and dropped the bag. It lay there on the pavement in the center of the bridge over the brook-- the shining prize in my quest for justice.

Dwayne called me some names over his shoulder for good measure, as he ran on home. A parting shot of a desperate man. The weak words of the defeated. I picked up the backpack.

I smiled at the bag, gave it a little hug, and thought, "No brook for you today, my friend." And jogged back into the school to find Louie.

Louie was right where I'd left him, having a meltdown at his locker, his world ending in the form of a drowned red Nike backpack. I handed him the rescued bag with flourish and a warm triumph swelling in my heart. Or maybe that was just my asthma kicking in after all that running.

"Here!" I proclaimed. "It's safe!"

But Louie snatched it from my hand like I'd tried to brook-bag him myself. He glared up at me, gave a swipe to his running nose, his tear-stained eyes, and slung the bag on his shoulder. Without a word, he stalked off.

I stood there, watching Louie's retreating back bob off into the afternoon sun, and I shook my head.

I bet Wonder Woman had these moments, too. The scenes they never showed us.

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Cortez' Six and the Edgar Allen Poe Junior High School Cardsharps

"No running, jumping, skipping, sports equipment, hopscotch, tree-climbing, gum-chewing, or pointy, pointy arts-and-crafts."

The swing sets had been removed for our own safety, as had the jungle gym. This left the school playground flat and empty. A desolate black macadam sea.

Such was the start of lawsuit fever in the 80s. And rather than run the risk of being sued by an angry parent when little Suzie sprained her knee in a tragic hopscotch accident, the school determined they had two choices:

They could wrap us all in giant bags of foam packing peanuts...

Or they could just remove everything on the playground that might cause injury.

Or temptation.

Or, you know... fun.

As a result, after lunch, many a kid decided that going out onto the playground wasn't really worth the effort. With all the play taken from it, there was only ground. And bullies had a habit of making you TASTE ground when they didn't have anything else to do. Like out on a Jersey blacktop wasteland.

Then one day one of my lunch pals, Felix "the Cat" Cortez-- the kind of kid who was practically a jaded divorcee by age 12-- plunked the deck of cards onto the cafeteria table with a narrow gaze.

"Gin rummy," he proclaimed. "Play for points. Highest points at the end of the school year-- which will be me-- is the winner. Everybody else? A giant loser." He smirked at the kids around him. "Which we already knew. So who's in?"

Well, every one of us knew gin rummy sure beat lunch followed by a knuckle sandwich.

"Me," said Pete Cobb, a sci-fi/fantasy nut who knew how to wield insults like Excalibur. I once bought an insult book just to keep up with him.

"I'm in," said Manuel "Manny" Esteban, a talented young singer with a baby-face, who never quite got over the fact he wasn't selected as the most recent member of Menudo.

"I am gonna cream you buttwipes," announced Jan McNeely, who knew more colorful curses than a Jersey cabdriver, and who'd dyed her blond hair black in some grand statement she no longer remembered anymore.

The group turned to my friend Josette.

"Well... " began Josette hesitantly. I know she was weighing what her CCD teacher would have to say about this, and whether gin rummy was just one more step on the road to Hell. But the peer pressure was simply too much. "...Okay."

"Thorson?" queried The Cat, raising an eyebrow over the table at me.

"Never played it," I said, "but I'm in, too."

The Cat cackled. "Never played it? Girl, you are gonna be dead in the water."

"We'll see, Felix, we'll see," I said, trying to sound sure of myself.

"Rules of the game," began The Cat. "Seven card. Four of a kind or same-suit runs. Jokers, my friends, are wild. Cut the cards to see who goes first. High card has it."

We made the cut and Manny came up aces.

And this was the beginning of Cortez' Six, the greatest gin rummy tournament that Edgar Allen Poe Junior High School had ever seen.

Day after day we would choke down our peanut butter sandwiches, gorge our bananas and slurp down our Capri Suns, only to stash away our lunchboxes and clear time and space for the next deal.

Josette kept track of points meticulously in her Trapper Keeper notebook. She had the best handwriting of our group, and anyway, we all knew we couldn't trust anyone else with the tally.

Months went by this way. Initially, The Cat was well in the lead, but as time went on, the rest of us began to close in.

Pete Webb dealt name-calling with every hand...

Jan McNeely cursed with some crushing losses...

Manny was nearly ejected from the game many times for his annoying humming. Which, in retrospect, was probably a tell...

And even I grew more and more confident in the game by the day, eventually wiping the smug smile off the Cat's face as the tally grew neck-in-neck.

Winter turned to spring, and as the trees budded on the school playground, we remained immune to their greenery.... Unmoved by the gentle breezes. Just a few weeks more and the tourney would be over. Just a few weeks more and we'd separate the men from the boys...

Er, the women from the girls...

Er, the loser kids from the, um, non-loser kids.

And then, somewhere in the middle of a hand, a shadow fell over our table. We looked up to see Mr. Selleck, the wiry hatchet-faced vice principal in his perpetual brown tweed suit.

"What are you doing?" he asked, peering down on we six with the cards fanned in our hands. I half-expected The Cat to laugh and answer dominoes, but his expression was very grave.

"Gin rummy," Jan McNeely spoke up.

"Well, you can't do that. It's gambling!"

My heart was pounding in my chest. Would we be expelled for this? Or get detention? I just couldn't understand why this was a problem now, so close to the end of the year, because Mr. Selleck had to have walked past us a thousand times during the course of a hundred other rounds.

"We're only playing for points," I explained, and held aloft Josette's notebook as evidence.

But Mr. Selleck was already scooping up the cards from the table and grabbing the remaining ones from our hands. "No, I'm sorry, it doesn't matter. This is gambling and... and, well... that's simply not allowed in school." He seemed to be winging it with this little speech. "I have to take these. I'm sorry."

"It was only points!" Manny exclaimed.

Mr. Selleck's pointy mustached face went a bit red and he wouldn't look us in the eye. "Look, I'm sorry. Just go out onto the playground."

On the playground. Great...

We grabbed our lunch boxes and bookbags and slumped from the cafeteria, out onto the playground. But by the time the bell to class had rung, we'd already developed our own theory for the breakup of Cortez' Six.

"Papercuts," laughed Felix. "We could have mortally wounded ourselves from papercuts from those cards."

"And-- gasp-- sue the school!" Josette agreed.

"Did you know 15% of visits to the school nurse involve paper cuts that won't stop bleeding?" I suggested. "Oh, it's true!"

"My cousin almost lost his effing arm that way," Jan confided with a grin.

Yes, we determined-- somewhere in the vice principal's office there would soon be a dangerous deck of cards secreted away in a folder, a drawer, or a wall safe.

And maybe Cortez' Six never did get to determine who was real cardsharp among our ranks...

But we sure as heck had fun those remaining weeks plotting the heist of that Bicycle deck of 52.

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Fig Newton, Angry Unger, and the Birth of Tyrone

As summer slips away to fall, and kids resume the routine of Readin', Writin' and Math That Makes Sense to No One Over 20, I'm reminded of my own days in the public school system. And throughout high school, much of that involved a substitute teacher we'll call Mrs. Unger.

Mrs. Unger was a gray woman. Gray hair, gray skin, gray bottle-lensed glasses and gray clothing. The reason for this was she'd already been substitute teaching through most of the heyday of ink engravings and black-and-white media. And when everything else made the switch to color, Mrs. Unger just didn't have the energy to make the leap, too.

It was we students who kept her from going Kodachrome in the 60s, I think. Decades and decades of students who drained the very the color from her day-to-day life.

We know Mrs. Unger had been teaching a long time because she told us so, every class. Whenever her authority would come into question-- even whenever a student would try to give her a helping hand-- Mrs. Unger would spit out the tally of her years in service to the school like a wad of well-used tobacco.

And for every year we encountered her, it seemed her years of teaching would increase by at least five.

"I know where the seating chart is by now, Jose Rosado!" she'd snap. "I've been substitute teaching in this school system for 27 years!"

Or...

"Don’t you tell me how to run a classroom, Marisol Nieves! After 32 years, I'd say I know very well what I'm doing without any help from the likes of you!"

Or...

"What’s that, Rodney Goldblum? No, I see it right in front of me. I haven’t been teaching for 489 years for nothing. Why, in fact, Richard III was a smart aleck just like you are. And I didn't take any lip from him, either!"

Yes, we drained her sense of time along with her color. Oh, not us specifically. But decades of students like us. We wore out her memory... her patience... her hearing...

Mrs. Unger wasn't born, she was made.

So that's why initially, many of us felt kinda sorry for her. This gray woman with features eroded into a hard, scowling mistrust.

I know initially a few of us girls thought we could soothe her with kindness. A cheerful greeting. A polite word. An olive branch, so to speak, extended from Kiddom to the adult world. Anything to see her turn from gray rock to something less cold, less impenetrable.

But it was too little, too late. Good kids, bad kids… She'd endured so much Post-Traumatic Student Syndrome over the years, we were all the same now. One hateful mass.

And that caused the birth of "Tyrone."

You see, one kid, Jerry "Fig" Newton, was kind of a joker. Fig was a pretty good guy really. A tall, broad, curly-haired kid who was as sharp on the football field as he was in the classroom. A bright kid with energy to burn off, Fig had an ornery sense of humor that couldn't quite be contained.

And this left him cracking jokes when the mood struck... offering loud tuneless serenades in the hallways... and developing the keen ability to imitate the precise sound of the bell.

It was seventh grade and all the planets had fallen into alignment. Fate brought Fig Newton to Mrs. Unger.

Mrs. Unger had subbed for our class maybe two times at this point, but whether she remembered us or not, it's hard to say. Individual faces and names seemed long ago unimportant to her. We were One. A giant seething hormonal mass, precisely the same as the kids in 1965, 1776 and in 1483, when her career had really just started taking off.

So she began each class by calling attendance. And one by one we shouted out our names.

"Orton?"

"Here!"

"Ortiz?"

"Here!"

"Newton?"

Silence.

"Newton….? Gerald Newton?"

Only Fig Newton just sat in his chair, still, patient.

"Gerald Newton?"

I don’t think anyone dared to look directly at Fig, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see his small, amused smile.

Behind her gray lenses, Mrs. Unger's gray eyes fixed on the class. "Is Gerald Newton not here?"

"He’s out sick, Miz Unger," offered Fig helpfully.

The answer pacified. Mrs. Unger made a note in the attendance book and then pressed on.

Timmons… Thorson… Varges… Weiman… West…

One by one we all responded when our names were called. Until process of elimination caused Mrs. Unger to finally turn her focus back on Jerry Newton.

Mrs. Unger frowned. "Didn't I call your name?"

"Nope," said Fig.

"Well, what is your name, then?"

"I’m Tyrone," Fig told her not missing a beat.

"Tyrone?" Mrs. Unger squinted at the list before her, trailing a finger down the chart, name after name checked and double-checked. We didn't breathe. We didn't move. A stillness had come over the class like the achingly-quiet yellow haze right before a tornado.

"I don’t see a Tyrone here," she said finally.

"I’m new," said Tyrone.

"Oh." Mrs. Unger blinked. Reread the list. And promptly penciled "Tyrone" at the bottom of the attendance list.

She went on with the class.

That's how it began, and that's how it continued.

Seventh grade… eighth grade… ninth grade… Tyrone persisted for Mrs. Unger.

Though, if pressed, I doubt she would have remembered the name of any other kid in the entire school, Mrs. Unger surely remembered Tyrone.

Tyrone once got our entire class dismissed five minutes early with his expert bell imitation, and too late did Mrs. Unger discover the truth. Armed with this knowledge going forward then, just as Tyrone made it his quest to unnerve Mrs. Unger, Mrs. Unger had pinpointed a troublemaker. And she made it her solemn mission to quash Tyrone.

So class after class, year after year, Mrs. Unger scolded Tyrone... gave Tyrone detention... sent Tyrone to the Principal’s office and wrote him up for our regular teacher.

Tyrone never felt compelled to show up for these punishments, of course-- owing to him not actually existing. But Fig Newton would enjoy a nice afternoon in the boy’s bathroom. Or the gym. Or dawdle over an early lunch. Or just go home for a pleasant freebie day.

Tyrone may have eventually gotten suspended for all I know. But Fig Newton, well, he had an impeccable school record-- if a lot of absenteeism.

Somewhere in tenth grade, Mrs. Unger did eventually find out that Jerry Newton and Tyrone were, in fact, one and the same. To this day none of my classmates remembers precisely how, and Fig, as far as I know, hasn't come clean about it.

I'd like to think it was something dramatic, like taking the mask off Spiderman only to find Peter Parker underneath it all... Like seeing beyond Clark Kent's glasses in one moment of epiphany to the Superman who was there all along...

But I imagine it was just some innocent conversation in the teacher's room over cardboard pizza and three-bean-salad, how this mysterious student, Tyrone was penciled in every time the teacher had a day off. Notes got compared. Things were mulled over. And two and two were finally put together to make four.

Even the New Math told us that.

But year after year, I remember waiting for it. That's what said "school" to me. The anticipation of gray Mrs. Unger, squinting over attendance...

And that melodic sound, as Tyrone's name echoed out over the classroom.

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