Nice Try

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by Josh Gondelman


  And then there was the haircut. My springy, curly hair refused to be tamed into a JTT-style (Jonathan Taylor Thomas, for anyone who never saw the cover a Tiger Beat magazine in the 1990s) mushroom cut. My tips were nigh-on unfrostable. To compensate, I tried to grow an Afro, which came off kind of like accessorizing an old, beat-up car by gluing a satellite dish to the roof. I still have my first driver’s license, and in the photo I look like the bass player from an all-white, all-child Parliament-Funkadelic cover band.

  My peers called me “Screech,” a reference to the nerdy character on the teen sitcom Saved by the Bell. Played by Dustin Diamond, Screech became the dork that defined dweebdom for an entire generation. He wore bright, tacky shirts. His voice cracked constantly, as if his body were an instrument through which puberty itself spoke. No boys wanted to be him, and no girls wanted to be with him (and the other way around as well).

  But I had the advantage of going to a high school where no one was especially cool. In fact, the modest successes I achieved in my young adult life were enabled by the fact that I grew up in a small town. At the time I was in high school, Stoneham, Massachusetts, had about 23,000 residents, one of whom was an honest-to-goodness town drunk. From a numerical perspective, my high school couldn’t sustain the kind of cliques you see on TV. Nearly everyone played multiple roles, so it was hard to stereotype. Star soccer players acted in the spring musical. Stoners competed on the math team. Our student body blurred the lines of high school social strata like the goth cheerleaders from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video.

  Because the social circles at my high school were constantly overlapping to form social Venn diagrams, it didn’t seem especially unusual that the class elected officials, from president on down, had two disparate jobs: they planned the proms and dances, and they wrote a comedy sketch for Carnival Ball.

  What the hell is Carnival Ball? you are probably wondering, unless we went to high school together. (And if we did: Hi, Mark!)

  Carnival Ball is, ostensibly, a talent show. It lasts three hours. Although, in the same way that a windchill factor makes the air feel colder, a parade of sixteen-year-olds performing show tunes with fifteen-year-old piano accompanists can dilate the sensation of sitting for 180 minutes into what seems like the entire duration of the Cretaceous period. Students at all grade levels audition with individual or group talents, mostly vocal, dance, or instrumental performances, many of which are legitimately charming on their own, if not all in a row.

  Additionally, each grade puts on a comedy sketch. The sketches range in duration from “a few minutes” to “the very concept of time melts away and it becomes impossible to remember what life was like before or after the sophomore class sketch.” And so, because an aptitude for comedy writing was an asset to the office, I was voted class vice-president my freshman year and class president after that. My school’s codification of popularity through comedy was a weird coincidence that set me on a course for my entire career. It’s the kind of thing that Malcolm Gladwell would be interested in if I were way, way, way more successful.

  Every spring, the Stoneham High School senior class votes for the Carnival Ball Court, which consists of ten senior boys and ten senior girls (including one of each named as the event’s king and queen). The members of the court perform a choreographed ballroom dance in full formal wear to open the show. They then sit on the stage for the rest of the night, watching each act from behind, while the rest of the audience watches them watch the show. From that point on, their only real responsibility is not to be so drunk that they fall out of their chairs.

  The point of this institution was never clear to me, and as an adult I have several questions: Was the invention of the court a trap to make sure the most popular students didn’t sneak off to get each other pregnant during the marching band’s rendition of the Star Wars theme? Was it a way for adults to gaze on the faces of youth in full bloom, remembering what they’ve lost? What if members of the court are gay? Isn’t it weird to make them perform an elaborate heterosexuality masquerade? Why is a whole town’s idea of sexuality shaped by the aesthetic of a Baz Luhrmann movie remade with a cable access budget? I will never know the answers to any of these questions. Best-case scenario, the Carnival Ball Court is a way to make the twenty most popular students feel the prickly self-consciousness that the rest of the student body experienced every day. Worst-case scenario, the tradition descends from some kind of arranged marriage or human trafficking convention. (“You have to see how a prospective bride dances before you purchase her, after all!”)

  In a school short on popularity contests, it felt extra strange to devolve into a full-on feudal system for one night. Even most stereotypical high school hierarchies don’t elect total lineages of nobility. Prom king and queen (which we did not have at Stoneham High) have always been the province of the clearest cool kids (or, as a prank, an outcast with psychic powers). Same for homecoming king and queen. But to expand a list to ten is almost more exclusive. It’s easier to believe you’d be on an elite list if the list is never explicitly written out. You can always imagine you fall in the top 10 percent of the most-liked classmates until someone actually aggregates the data. As a teenager, though, everything is weird. I didn’t see this event as much different from the idea of going to a prom at all or learning calculus, a discipline I spent a year of my life practicing and now can barely define.

  The work I did as a class vice-president had mixed results. My participation in planning the class dance can be charitably described as “minimal” and accurately described as “probably an active impediment.” I have limited aptitude for choosing complementary colors of streamers, and even less skill at hanging those streamers in a way that allows a high school cafeteria to embody a vague or impossible theme such as “A Night to Remember” or “Follow Your Dreams.” In my defense, regardless of decorations, the real theme of every high school dance is dry-humping your crush in the same place you ate tater tots six hours earlier.

  Fortunately, I managed to redeem my weak showing as an event planner in my execution of the other half of my duty in the class’s executive branch: sketch comedy writing. When Carnival Ball came around in the spring of my freshman year, I knew I had to rise to the occasion. To make up for my shortcomings in the streamer and R&B playlist departments, I needed to step up big time if I wanted to get reelected.

  Meeting number one got off to an inauspicious start. One stipulation of each class skit was that anyone who wanted to participate had to be given a role. That meant before we hammered out a script, we had to see how many people the skit would have to accommodate. Because the freshman class had relatively few after-school commitments, and the students had not yet grown (literally) too cool for school, our adviser’s classroom teemed with enthusiastic participants.

  The room buzzed with unfocused energy. Despite the class officers’ best attempts to corral the cast, chaos reigned. We’d settled on a basic premise (“How the Grinch Stole Carnival Ball”), but it seemed like everyone had a different vision for how to execute the idea. Entire social cliques requested to appear onstage together. One classmate insisted on incorporating his signature dance move, which, according to his demonstration, consisted of getting halfway into a headstand before falling over. After two hours, the meeting adjourned, and if anything, we’d gotten further from writing a usable script than we were when we started.

  I arrived home (okay, I got a ride home from my parents) disappointed but inspired. We had the nugget of the idea, and I thought with a night’s effort, I could convert that into whatever it is a nugget becomes. (Do they grow into chickens? Is that the nugget-to-chicken relationship?) Alone at my parents’ computer, I needed only a couple of hours to change the words from Dr. Seuss’s original text to suit the purposes of the sketch. When I showed my draft to the other class officers the next day, they had surprisingly few tweaks. My script had given everyone a moment to shine while still shoehorning the most eccentric characters into the existin
g structure of the Grinch’s story. With just a little massaging of teenage ego (“I know this isn’t the big entrance you had in mind, but sometimes less is more!”) we got the cast on board.

  On the day of the show, our sketch killed. I wasn’t the star, but word traveled that I was responsible for the bulk of the script. On the strength of our Carnival Ball sketches (and the fact that my input never ruined a prom), I was elected class president the next three years. Senior year, I opted out of the pageantry of the Carnival Ball Court and co-emceed the show with my friends Carolyn and Emily. I never became cool, but in the small pool of my high school class, I was lucky to be recognized for the things I was good at. Over the next few years, I scaled back the activities I thought I should be doing (band, math team) as well as the ones I was never suited for (basketball) to spend more time on the extracurriculars that mattered to me.

  Carnival Ball wasn’t the focal point of my high school career as a performer. After playing several bit parts in The Wizard of Oz at the end of freshman year, I slowly integrated myself into the drama club, and by senior year, I spent nearly every afternoon at rehearsal for one of the group’s three annual shows. But Carnival Ball was the first thing that gave me the confidence to realize that maybe I didn’t have to preemptively acknowledge that I was a little weird or didn’t fit in. Maybe who I was, was good enough, and I didn’t have to apologize or make jokes about it. There was, in fact, a place I could fit in. And I had skills I could be proud of.

  Most of all, Carnival Ball taught me that despite my haircut, I wasn’t actually Screech.

  I Hope These Years Aren’t the Best of Your Lives

  Not to brag, but as president of my high school class, I got to give a speech at graduation, which is ridiculous. No high school student should speak at a graduation, for the simple fact that most of them don’t know anything worth saying into a microphone. What special wisdom could I have been expected to possess? The only things I knew for sure that the adults in the audience most likely didn’t know were facts that they learned in high school and had since forgotten. But the Pythagorean theorem does not exactly make for stirring oration.

  I don’t regret what I said to my high school classmates and their families, but fortunately there’s no available footage of the event. And if I could talk to them now, I’d do it differently. Since I do not have access to a time machine, and my high school has not invited me back to speak to any subsequent graduating classes (what gives, SHS?), I am forced to publish that speech here.

  So here’s what thirty-four-year-old me would say to a group of high school students, which honestly sounds like a nightmare, but I’d do it because I’m a giver:

  Good evening, Stoneham High School class of 2003. It’s me, your class president. You may not recognize me, because I started losing my hair basically six months after graduation, and my metabolism slowed down right after I hit thirty, and I haven’t figured out how to counteract that with diet and exercise. But who am I kidding? You’ll eventually learn all this from Facebook.

  Also, just a quick heads-up: in the future there’s a thing called Facebook, and it helps you keep in touch with like nine people, and it’s maybe destroying the world by allowing the dissemination of unfettered misinformation. No time to get into that now, though.

  This is a really exciting day. Some of us will be finished with formal education as of tonight. Others will go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt pursuing advanced degrees. At the five-year reunion, and maybe forever after, the first group will have more productive, stable lives, with families and careers firmly on track. Our guidance counselors didn’t tell us that, but it’s true, and it’ll be a real kick in the junk to the rest of us, many of whom will be somewhat or completely adrift, despite four years spent learning about US history or psychology or, worst of all, English.

  We’ve already come so far, though, as a group and as individuals. We’ve lifted each other up and consoled one another when we didn’t have enough collective might to stay afloat. We learned skills and absorbed knowledge and formed friendships. Some of us even met the people we’re going to spend the rest of our lives with, which is wild to me because you’ve only met like three hundred people. But that’s none of my business. It’s weird, but it’s none of my business. The point is, each of us has a better sense of who we are than we did four years ago.

  But, as far as we’ve come, we still have a long way to go. There are still so many things we need to decide. Where will we live? What will our families and communities look like? What kind of work will we dedicate our lives to? There are so many people we’re still going to meet. Except, of course, for those of you who have already met the person you’re going to marry. You’re pretty much done with that.

  That is once again beside the point. What’s important is that we have so much growth and change to look forward to. For example, it will be years before we can casually joke about 9/11. In fact, that moment feels so far off in the future that you’re probably all thinking it’s kind of grotesque of me to bring it up at all. I’m sorry to be a bummer, but I promise I’m right about this.

  My friend Sam always says, “People say that without the bad times, you wouldn’t be able to appreciate the good times, but that’s not true. If you just had escalating good things happen over time, you’d always be able to appreciate them, because they would still be better than what came before.”

  And that’s technically accurate, but it’s also true that if my legs were a fish tail, I’d be a merman. Just because something is true in theory doesn’t mean it’s worth attempting or even possible at all. But what I do hope is that from your triumphs and the inevitable setbacks, you learn the skills you need to care for yourself and for others. Don’t learn cruelty because it’s efficient. Don’t forsake gentleness because it’s uncool. If you have strength, use it to smash through bullshit, not to punch at everything that moves.

  Optimism is both more necessary and more difficult when everything seems to be crumbling around you.

  So, while only an eighteen-year-old goober who has never known real hardship or enduring sorrow would wish you a life of ever-increasing joy, here’s what I will say:

  I hope these years aren’t the best of your life. Sure, for most of us, high school was better than middle school, but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear. Some of the most frustrating years of your life are the ones when you have pubes but can’t drive. It’s the hormonal equivalent of being all dressed up with no place to go.

  And for many of us, these have been good years. Maybe we saw someone else’s genitals up close for the first time. Maybe you won some kind of championship and were greeted by a roaring crowd. That’s really exciting! It gets a lot harder to make people clap for you after this. Trust me. I’ve dedicated most of my life to it, and it’s yielded mixed results.

  And, even more important: if and when your life gets hard and bad for stretches, I hope that you never stop improving. Terrible things will happen to you, sometimes at random, often unpredictably. Cancer and breakups and hurricanes and shitting your pants at Thanksgiving and prejudice and dropping your cell phone in a pool don’t happen to teach you a lesson or as part of a greater plan.

  (Although, you should be careful with your cell phone. Eventually it will contain your entire life, and forgetting it on the kitchen counter when you leave for work will screw up your whole week. But again, there’s no time for that now. Also, sorry to swear earlier. But here’s something great about being an adult: swearing isn’t a big deal in almost any context. It’s totally fine.)

  But that doesn’t mean that you can’t evolve with every setback. Because every time you fail, or someone fails you, you could grow embittered and defeated and withdrawn. Or you could take some time to stomp around and curse heaven and earth before making the choice to become more resolute and compassionate and righteous and tender. Just because things are bad doesn’t mean you have to get worse with them.

  You don’t have to pretend things are
good; you just have to believe they can get better.

  It won’t always be easy. In some cases, that will take a substantial amount of time, or effort, or support, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. But you can always learn how to better stand up for yourself or for other people. You can always show up at a political protest for the first time. Every day is a new opportunity to fall in love or realize that you aren’t actually in love after all.

  Even at your lowest, there’s always a future in which you can try a new food or stop eating a food you hate that your parents always insisted was good for you. You can become gentler and more relentless. It’s not that today is the first day of the rest of your life—it’s that every day you are more you than you were the day before. Your brain and heart (and the rest of your body) can grow stronger and wiser and more skillful and vibrant.

  Happiness won’t be possible at every moment unless you have an unlimited supply of money, a boundless appetite for cocaine, and a nonexistent fear of death. But what is always available to you is the potential to do and be better and to derive satisfaction from those improvements on their own merits. What’s better than the feeling of always eating birthday cake is learning how to make a birthday cake or meeting someone who will make one for you or celebrating the birthday of someone who has, historically, gone unacknowledged. And I hope you’re able to see and enjoy those opportunities, even in the face of everything and everyone who might be aligned against you.

 

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