By request…
I’ve been spending the past few months talking about how the show How I Met Your Mother is a mirror of my life. Or a little more accurately, a mirror of what my life was like in business school and what I wish my life will return to. But there was a show on a long time ago that not only mirrored my life but was really what I wanted my life to be like. That show was, of course, Head of the Class.
The show came on the air in 1986 when I was in eighth grade. And while I knew that high school was not going to involve having Dr. Johnny Fever teaching me life lessons, I kind of hoped that all of my honors classes would somehow resemble these. Of course they didn’t because life just doesn’t resemble art or even late eighties ABC sitcoms.
The students really were just an amalgam of random stereotypical smart kids. This is the first problem that I had with the show because in an honors program you don’t get a bunch of individuals with incredibly different interests, it tends to be a combination of high achievers, math whizzes and guys like me who just happen to have a photographic memory that people mistakenly equate to being intelligent. I mean, I never had a Simone in my class. There was no girl who was solely a sensitive poet, though admittedly she did probably start my fascination with redheads. But we also had Eric the rebel, Jawharahal the Indian guy, Dennis the fat computer guy, and Janice the child prodigy.
As the comment said, they did have their assigned positions, half of which were sitting properly at their desk. Dennis hung out in the back with a computer keyboard in his lap. This was 1986 of course and no high school would have been on the net or even have anything much higher than a Commodore 64 so exactly what he was doing with a computer is beyond me. Eric the rebel sat on a desk near the front and showed attitude. And if I remember correctly Arvid sat in the back by Dennis, which is pretty much fitting since that is where I ended up in class.
Yes, if you needed to pick a television character who best resembles myself Arvid is your best choice. The math genius who is not only a total geek but is well aware that he is a total geek. And because of that weird self-realization he ends up hanging out in the back and cracking jokes mainly because you can’t make fun of someone who already knows that they are the joke. (For those of you who wonder why I am so self-deprecating this is basically it. I realized early on that if I was making fun of myself other people would a) laugh and b) not make fun of me. It’s a habit that I started half a lifetime ago and I would like to stop, I’m just not sure how.)
Plus, if you watched the show Arvid always ended up with the girl. That’s just one of those rules of television. Sure, he would fail comically at times but at the end of the day the guy who was certain about who he is would end up on top. And maybe life imitates art sometimes. I mean, I ended up on my prom court, one of those stories that I will write one night when I am sufficiently drunk and nearing my fifteenth high school reunion.
What I’m trying to get at here is that yeah, Head of the Class was not realistic. I was not in honors classes with a dozen geniuses who seemed to be friends and who never seemed to be ostracized from the rest of the world. Scottish comedians never showed up as our substitute teachers and never left. But when you’re fourteen and you would like to think that maybe, just for a moment, there might be a place for you in this whole mix of high school cliques well that is when you watched Head of the Class. Because while I never felt at home in high school, I’d like to think that I would have felt at home there.
The five random CDs of the week:
1) Tift Merritt “Bramble Rose”
2) The Smashing Pumpkins “Greatest Hits”
3) The Saw Doctors “Sing a Powerful Song”
4) Josh Rouse “Home”
5) Sally Timms “Cowboy Sally”
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