The Lonely Heart You See Tonight

Will not give up without a fight

I can’t take credit for the line - it’s Richard Marx, the eighties pop star you were probably happy you’d forgotten.

“The Lonely Heart” was on a Richard Marx tape that I played to death on my Walkman my senior year in high school, 1991-1992. I used to listen to it while I was working through lunch in the calculus teacher’s classroom.

I’m extremely good at all things liberal arts, especially writing, but math is not my strong suit. I struggle, but I can work and do it, especially if someone will teach me. It was said that to get into Yale, you had to take calculus, so even though only maybe five kids per year did at the performing arts high school where I went (Interlochen, of recent Epstein files fame, and no I won’t be wading into that trauma vomit, thanks.) Most kids, even on the academic track, stopped at trig. But I went all the way to calculus because I was going to get into Yale.

I decided to go to Yale in the eighth grade, in the middle school bathroom, to be exact. I was in there with Katie Hall, who played Anna in our musical of The King and I. It was before school. She said, “Have you thought about where you’re going to college?” I can’t recall if I said I had or not.

“I’m going to Yale,” said Katie Hall.

“I’m going to Yale too,” I said, in much the same way I might agree now that yes, I am Mary Poppins.

And that was that.

My mother researched what it would take. AP classes, AP tests, this much foreign language (I did more). She went to an information session held in Raleigh, NC where we lived and found it all out. Interlochen specialized in sending kids to Curtis and Julliard, but it had a good record of sending kids to the Ivies too. And one of the kids it sent to the Ivies… the only one the year before me… was…

“There’s a boy in this, isn’t there?” says anyone familiar with the story line.

Let’s call him Aaron, which is his middle name. Now a happily married (as far as I know) father and college professor in a town not all that far from me, but we’ve been out of touch since college. The first Jewish boy I ever fell for.

We met the weekend I went to visit Interlochen. Immediately we hit it off. Various disasters ensued while I was at Interlochen, some of them hilarious, but I won’t tell those here. We never ended up dating, but we did become good friends.

Aaron went to Yale. I was determined to follow him.

I remember making the call on the phone. “I’m thinking of applying to Yale and you know a lot about that school.” That was the message I left. Must have been the summer after my junior year. He invited me to visit him at Yale and though my mom could barely afford it she found the money. I stayed with him and we did theater things because that’s what he did. I didn’t end up doing any theater at Yale - I was a Yale Political Union girl - but that weekend at Yale sleeping on Aaron’s dorm room floor convinced me that Yale was the place for me.

So slog away at calculus I did. I skipped lunch and stayed in my calculus teacher’s room. I worked so hard that even though I deserved a D she gave me a C.

It can be very hard to push through and do what we must do to get what we want. It’s so much easier to not want anything. I’m good at cutting my losses - usually - and it used to seem so much easier to know what was right than it is now.

I think one can rarely go wrong with hard work. In the eighties it was normal to have a work ethic. Everyone worked hard, or said they did, and loudly. Reagan and Thatcher bragged about how little they slept, and that probably contributed to them getting Alzheimer’s. I wouldn’t advocate for skipping sleep anymore (do not call me after 9 pm) but I do believe in hard work. And I want to model that for any students I have, now and forever.

While I sometimes feel like my younger life was charmed - three times people created jobs for me that did not previously exist, I won campaigns that were considered unwinnable, etc. - when I look back there was almost no luck involved. Everything that seemed like a miracle was the logical result of tons of hard work and making sure I was in the right place at the right time.

So I will continue to work hard. And since there’s only one place I am scheduled to be every weekday for the foreseeable future, I’ll have to pray that’s the right place at the right time.