Funny story behind this one, when I graduated High School oh back in 1989 I was the editor of our High School yearbook. In order to pay for the books we had to sell advertising space in the back to local merchants and family's who wanted to give their best wishes to the students. Many of the girls in my class (YES, I went to an ALL GIRLS High School - don't ask) took out pages with their friends. Most dedicating their undying love for their boyfriends at the time or claiming they would be "friends forever." Funny because when I went back for my 10 year reunion many of these girls were not friends at all. This is odd to me since out of the six other girls in my group of friends 3 of them I still keep in touch with regularly. Two of them are still around but I don't talk to that often and only one of them has been MIA since college. At the reunion I had a lot of fun opening the yearbook to any one of these girls and saying so what happened? Here it says you will be friends till the end. Most were amazed that after 10 years four of us were still really good friends.
Everyone was really "clicky" in High school. My group seemed to be composed of all the rejects from other groups. We consisted of 2 Irish, 1 Italian, 1 British, 1 Puerto Rican, 1 Korean, 1 Chinese and we called ourselves The B Crew. B was for BODEGA because we would, in senior year, go out to the bodega down the block, pickup some wine coolers or beer and go drinking in the park a few blocks away (sad really because we were obvious underage and still in uniform). It was always fun because when I went back to class the girl that sat behind me in economics would be stoned and we would always get the nun off topic and have her talk about what was happening in the world (YES, I went to an all girls CHATHOLIC High School - again don't ask). Deep conversations about controversy that happened on Geraldo Rivera like when a skinhead threw a chair and hit him right in the face. Or her love for Medjugorje and how we all need to go there someday. I don't even think we really learned any economics stuff because at the end of the term we had to write a paper on anything we talked about in class and I remember I wrote mine about skinheads.
Why am I telling you all this?? Oh yeah the yearbook ... well like other clicks The B Crew took out a two page spread ad and made a fun collage of photos and quotes from the past 4 years. This is the part that sucked because all the friend's pages were edited by the teacher yearbook monitor. Many had quotes like that big 80's hit "I'll house you" by the Jungle Brothers while on our page we tried to quote that Jimmy Buffett song "Why Don't We Get Drunk and Screw". We even put it down as "W.D.W.G.D.A.S" but were told by the monitor "what if some grandmother was to pick this up and her mind would wonder what it meant." WTF! The teacher had really stupid reasons for not leaving in many of the quotes so in order to get back we put this poem on our page. The monitor couldn't do anything about it because it was a poem she had covered in class. And it worked because there were 7 of us in The B Crew. So again, in honor of National Poetry Month and yet another shout out to the girls in The B Crew, I give you We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks. Happy Poetry month.
