Electric Blue

School girl crushes, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and seemingly small decisions that change you life

Perhaps the reason why I love teaching seventh and eighth graders is that seventh and eight grade were absolutely pivotal years in my life.

I lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the middle of desegregation of schools. I think I’ve written about this before. In seventh grade, my mom and I made the decision that I would leave my neighborhood school, full of well off white people and blonde girls who would make the cheer leading squad, which was THE THING TO DO, and go to the “magnet” school for what they called gifted kids back then. I rode a bus close to an hour each way to get there, and it was worth every minute. It was in the black part of town, so while we were tracked in academics and my academic classes were mostly white and Asian kids, extracurricular activities were totally integrated.

Ligon Middle School had an amazing arts program. It had a symphony - as a middle school! It had a very advanced drama program that produced plays and a musical every year. Black, white and other kids mixed happily in the arts. The year we did The King and I, Anna was white, and Lady Thiang was black.

I wanted to try out for the basketball team, but my mom didn’t want me to, so I tried out for the play, West Side Story. I didn’t get cast - I really can’t sing - but I was asked if I wanted to be Assistant Stage Manager. I immediately said yes, and I fell in love with stage management.

I was a great stage manager. I know how to run things, how to get people to do what they need to do, how to manage a million details at once and most importantly, I am calm when others are losing their heads. Actors of any age are always losing their heads, so stage management was perfect for me. The stage manager was an eighth grader named Sarah, and I worshiped her and learned from her. Mr. Ataway was the director, Ms. Steager was the director of music. There was a pit orchestra made up of middle school students. I was in heaven at play practice day after day after school.

I remember kissing my first middle school boyfriend, Nathan Bush, who played a Jet, in the costume room. But my real crush was on Walter, a high school student who was a Ligon theater alum. He eventually went on to study theater at Carnegie Mellon and I wonder what the hell happened to him. Does anyone know?

He was blonde, blue-eyed, and I met him just a year before I had my first crush on a Jewish guy who I think may have been the first Jewish guy I ever met. But that, my friends, is a story for another day.

Walter and his friend James Foster played cameo roles in West Side Story. I can’t remember what he played. I just remember that he was beautiful and kind and very nice to me. He used to bring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to rehearsal and give me half. I had never really had them before, but thus started an abiding love for PB&J. (If a Jewish man speaking Hebrew gives me a PB&J I would probably marry him without asking further questions, which would be insane but is something I might do.)

The Icehouse song “Electric Blue” was on the radio all the time then, and I listened to the radio constantly. It became my song for Walter.

If a boy had a chance, a chance with someone like you

Are you gonna break his heart, let him cry for the moon?

Are you hiding, somewhere behind those eyes?

Walter was graduating that year and I was a seventh grader, so nothing happened and I never saw him again after the play was over. But I always associated that song with him until years and years later when finally some other crush took it. I have a rule that a song can not be reassigned to another guy until there is at least one in between, but there were maybe fifty crushes and/or boyfriends in the years the “Electric Blue” belonged to the one and only Walter. (In my defense, it was 1987 to 2023 and I have never been married. That’s a lot of time and a lot of pop music.)

Becoming an Assistant Stage Manager led to me becoming the Stage Manager. That led to me getting a scholarship to Interlochen Arts Academy, where I made lifelong friends, learned how to organize, and got the chance to get into Yale. I was unusual, which was what Yale wanted. And what they got.

So that second semester of seventh grade set into place the course that would take the rest of my life.

Going to a special school for smart kids and artistic kids, where we were tracked in our academics and got to really reach our potential, changed my life. I was bored in regular school and the popular kids didn’t like the smart kids. This has influenced many of my beliefs about education. The idea that you can teach kids with eight different reading levels in a classroom of thirty where some kids are so troubled that they are violent is insane. The smart kids get bullied, the kids who need special attention don’t get it, and everyone loses. All schools need more funding, but I hate to see individual kids sacrificed at the altar of ideology of any kind. Kids are not all the same. They have different needs. I needed academic challenge, artistic opportunity, and smart guys.

Looks like nothing has changed, except the guys are way older now. And they seem to keep getting better with age. Until of course they die, but let’s not worry about that for now.

Loviefluffy claims my electric/Israeli blue scarf.