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Oh, Petula Clark. How I love your voice: ”You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares….” She worked that song! It was much more like listening to a motivational speaker, passionately shouting out an inspirational message, than just mere lyrics. That song is old, now that I think about it; it was written in 1964 – the year I was born. But this was 1977.
After a month of flailing around Los Angeles, looking for a place to live for our family’s remaining unit of four (my oldest brother and sister no longer in the mix since they already lived away from home), my parents had found the tiny, aforementioned in my essays (Week 4), one-bedroom apartment. It was in an area full of fourplexes near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood. Most people think that Hollywood and Sunset are parallel to each other. Well, there is a magical place – this sad end of the non-rainbow – were the two iconic boulevards actually meet. Here, Hollywood succumbs to Sunset and vanishes into thin air. The end of Hollywood. That is where we ended up. That should have been foreshadowing enough!
This reminds me: a few years later when I was due to have graduated from my school in Lima, if I had not moved to the EEUU, I received a really nice yearbook from Pestalozzi Schule. Somewhere in it, there was a page dedicated to the students that had left the country before finishing secondary school with the rest of the class. Pestalozzi’s graduating class was only about 60 students and most of us had known one another since the age of 4 or 5, so it was not unusual that people kept track of the ones that had moved away. The brief paragraph read something like “Denise moved to Hollywood to study architecture.” I always thought it was funny that they wrote ‘Hollywood’ instead of Los Angeles – it conjured up something so much more glamorous – and also the sentence sort of comically made it sound to me as if that was the place to go for architecture.
So there we were: the early days of 1977. In what felt like a swoop from one day to another, my father was bringing my brother and me to the nearest junior high. For Luis Héctor, it would mean entering 9th grade, by the calculations of the administrator behind the school’s counter after her in-vain perusing of transcripts that were in a language that she did not understand and many questions for my father. And for me, it was 7th grade. The tricky thing is that in Perú the academic year ends in December, so we had already completed the school year and I think we both lost a semester in the exchange. We were joining the already swimming river of students in the second semester of the year. It was tough. Second semester meant that there were less new students to camouflage ourselves around to keep a low profile, but even if that had been the case…we had ‘fresh off the plane’ traits written all over us. Kids could sniff those a mile away.
There are nuances to the rules of clothing that teens wear that, throughout history, have been written in secret, sacred places that adults and foreigners will never find. We were wearing 70s clothes, but not the right kind of 70s clothes. I remember this cool-ass (because I have no other way of describing it!) blue jean jumpsuit with a big silver zipper in the front, which I loved to wear with a white turtleneck underneath. Problem was: tweendom/teendom is very specific. The adored jumpsuit was outside the current code for that month, for that year, for 12-year-olds in L.A. Case in point, the next fall of 8th grade, now that I had access to the secret fashion memo, I was able to buy the uniform of every 13-year-old: flannel or cotton plaid shirt and blue jeans with, preferably, some cute design on the back pockets, seemingly hearts or stars being the ultimate. But for my early F.O.P. days, the jumpsuit failed me. I will never know if it was too avant garde or too passé, but there was laughter as I walked by. And you don’t need to speak any English to know when people are making fun of you.
Which brings me to the big, loud neon sign following us over our heads – like the omnipresent rhombuses over a walking Sims family – we were other because we did not speak any English. Administrator Lady did her best to place us in the available bilingual classes she could find, but some of the days (inner freak attack) would have to be filled with courses that were completely in English.
And then came one of the most awkward moments of my young life (not as bad perhaps as The Deviated Spine Incident of 1978, which I will tell you about some other time, but pretty bad): Administrator Lady turns to my father and says, “I have to check for lice. Do they have lice?” For years, I have wondered if a transferring student from West Covina or San Luis Obispo would have gotten the same treatment. The word for lice in Spanish is piojos – it sounds really yucky and definitely befitting the infestation and bugginess of the whole deal. No, we had never had that, and when my dad translated what was happening, I was mortified. But this really happened. Luis Héctor and I got inspected, right there across the counter by Admin Lady. I remember thinking, Does she know that Lima is a major metropolitan capital city? I was not too young to feel that.
That half hour in that office was full of events to last a lifetime and could pay for a therapist's yacht but the icing, after we had satisfactorily passed the piojo predicament, was my dad: “OK, I will see you at 3:00 o’clock.” The gauntlet.
You know those “Wait, what?!?” moments? This was one of them. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe, “Oh, they can start on Monday.” – but not right then and there, walking into my first class in the US while the school day was already in session. There is a high-pitched ‘EEEEE’ sound that is the equivalent of what a person feels in the second of figuring out news like this – something sort of electrical that goes through your whole body along with the Wait, what?!? moment. You know what I mean.
After a class period in ‘Bilingual Math’ with me thinking, “Math is universal; I can do this.” I felt hopeful, as long as I remembered to steer away from the Latino toughies at the back of the classroom already trying to coerce me into saying new English phrases. “What do you mean? You don’t speak any English? OK, say, ‘F@#& you!’ to the teacher” I don’t think so.
But the winner was Music with freaking Mrs. Peterman. She was the one that asked me to read the lyrics out loud in front of the class for a new song that we were going to learn. I still didn’t know which weirdo English words one had to over-pronounce and which were sort of Spanish normal. I knew ‘door’ was a big conspiracy: not oooh, but oh. Then why not do the descent thing and omit the deceiving second ‘O’? Anyway, that first week, I plowed through the lyric sheet out loud because it had to be done. Even after decades, I know that ‘tomb’ got a big laugh because I pronounced a simple oh not oooh and a deep lingering bbb. Weirdo English, please put an extra 'O' if that is what you want the yield to be. No sense.
I remember her showing a documentary on African musical instruments, students all around me madly scribbling notes in the half-darkness. I would look up and see really amazing and exotic and varied things on the screen, then look around and still…classmates feverishly jotting down notes. I couldn’t understand anything. So I gathered the courage: Mrs. Peterman needed to know. She would have a solution. I got up, walked to her desk, and in the best I could muster, said, “I don’t speak English.” She looked up, expressionless, and replied, “Go back to your seat.”
It sounds angsty all together now, doesn’t it? But it isn’t so bad. Like I heard Stephen Colbert say once, ‘Tragedy + Time = Comedy. There is a definite aftertaste of comedy in all this. The biggest pearl with which Mrs. Peterman endowed me, and which sort of exonerates her in my memory, is that she taught us one of the cheesiest things that will forever inhabit my brain. Petula Clark’s song “Downtown”? Fabulous. Petula Clark’s song “Downtown” with the word “Downtown” replaced by “King High” – to make it some forced, rah-rah anthem to our junior high? Absolute cheese.
So Mrs. Peterman did me a few favors. First, that if I could understand “Go back to your seat.” already, I was going to be fine. Somewhere within me, I could decode English with my German or Spanish, or maybe body language is the biggest decoder ring of all. Second, she taught me in the coldest and most unfriendly way to suck it up. It is the perfect lesson because you can’t negotiate with or argue back to cold like you would to maternal. And lastly, hello! Music can solve almost everything – it may very well be the place you can go to, to forget all your cares.
Downtown - performed by Petula Clark, written by Tony Hatch
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx06XNfDvk0
After a month of flailing around Los Angeles, looking for a place to live for our family’s remaining unit of four (my oldest brother and sister no longer in the mix since they already lived away from home), my parents had found the tiny, aforementioned in my essays (Week 4), one-bedroom apartment. It was in an area full of fourplexes near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood. Most people think that Hollywood and Sunset are parallel to each other. Well, there is a magical place – this sad end of the non-rainbow – were the two iconic boulevards actually meet. Here, Hollywood succumbs to Sunset and vanishes into thin air. The end of Hollywood. That is where we ended up. That should have been foreshadowing enough!
This reminds me: a few years later when I was due to have graduated from my school in Lima, if I had not moved to the EEUU, I received a really nice yearbook from Pestalozzi Schule. Somewhere in it, there was a page dedicated to the students that had left the country before finishing secondary school with the rest of the class. Pestalozzi’s graduating class was only about 60 students and most of us had known one another since the age of 4 or 5, so it was not unusual that people kept track of the ones that had moved away. The brief paragraph read something like “Denise moved to Hollywood to study architecture.” I always thought it was funny that they wrote ‘Hollywood’ instead of Los Angeles – it conjured up something so much more glamorous – and also the sentence sort of comically made it sound to me as if that was the place to go for architecture.
So there we were: the early days of 1977. In what felt like a swoop from one day to another, my father was bringing my brother and me to the nearest junior high. For Luis Héctor, it would mean entering 9th grade, by the calculations of the administrator behind the school’s counter after her in-vain perusing of transcripts that were in a language that she did not understand and many questions for my father. And for me, it was 7th grade. The tricky thing is that in Perú the academic year ends in December, so we had already completed the school year and I think we both lost a semester in the exchange. We were joining the already swimming river of students in the second semester of the year. It was tough. Second semester meant that there were less new students to camouflage ourselves around to keep a low profile, but even if that had been the case…we had ‘fresh off the plane’ traits written all over us. Kids could sniff those a mile away.
There are nuances to the rules of clothing that teens wear that, throughout history, have been written in secret, sacred places that adults and foreigners will never find. We were wearing 70s clothes, but not the right kind of 70s clothes. I remember this cool-ass (because I have no other way of describing it!) blue jean jumpsuit with a big silver zipper in the front, which I loved to wear with a white turtleneck underneath. Problem was: tweendom/teendom is very specific. The adored jumpsuit was outside the current code for that month, for that year, for 12-year-olds in L.A. Case in point, the next fall of 8th grade, now that I had access to the secret fashion memo, I was able to buy the uniform of every 13-year-old: flannel or cotton plaid shirt and blue jeans with, preferably, some cute design on the back pockets, seemingly hearts or stars being the ultimate. But for my early F.O.P. days, the jumpsuit failed me. I will never know if it was too avant garde or too passé, but there was laughter as I walked by. And you don’t need to speak any English to know when people are making fun of you.
Which brings me to the big, loud neon sign following us over our heads – like the omnipresent rhombuses over a walking Sims family – we were other because we did not speak any English. Administrator Lady did her best to place us in the available bilingual classes she could find, but some of the days (inner freak attack) would have to be filled with courses that were completely in English.
And then came one of the most awkward moments of my young life (not as bad perhaps as The Deviated Spine Incident of 1978, which I will tell you about some other time, but pretty bad): Administrator Lady turns to my father and says, “I have to check for lice. Do they have lice?” For years, I have wondered if a transferring student from West Covina or San Luis Obispo would have gotten the same treatment. The word for lice in Spanish is piojos – it sounds really yucky and definitely befitting the infestation and bugginess of the whole deal. No, we had never had that, and when my dad translated what was happening, I was mortified. But this really happened. Luis Héctor and I got inspected, right there across the counter by Admin Lady. I remember thinking, Does she know that Lima is a major metropolitan capital city? I was not too young to feel that.
That half hour in that office was full of events to last a lifetime and could pay for a therapist's yacht but the icing, after we had satisfactorily passed the piojo predicament, was my dad: “OK, I will see you at 3:00 o’clock.” The gauntlet.
You know those “Wait, what?!?” moments? This was one of them. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe, “Oh, they can start on Monday.” – but not right then and there, walking into my first class in the US while the school day was already in session. There is a high-pitched ‘EEEEE’ sound that is the equivalent of what a person feels in the second of figuring out news like this – something sort of electrical that goes through your whole body along with the Wait, what?!? moment. You know what I mean.
After a class period in ‘Bilingual Math’ with me thinking, “Math is universal; I can do this.” I felt hopeful, as long as I remembered to steer away from the Latino toughies at the back of the classroom already trying to coerce me into saying new English phrases. “What do you mean? You don’t speak any English? OK, say, ‘F@#& you!’ to the teacher” I don’t think so.
But the winner was Music with freaking Mrs. Peterman. She was the one that asked me to read the lyrics out loud in front of the class for a new song that we were going to learn. I still didn’t know which weirdo English words one had to over-pronounce and which were sort of Spanish normal. I knew ‘door’ was a big conspiracy: not oooh, but oh. Then why not do the descent thing and omit the deceiving second ‘O’? Anyway, that first week, I plowed through the lyric sheet out loud because it had to be done. Even after decades, I know that ‘tomb’ got a big laugh because I pronounced a simple oh not oooh and a deep lingering bbb. Weirdo English, please put an extra 'O' if that is what you want the yield to be. No sense.
I remember her showing a documentary on African musical instruments, students all around me madly scribbling notes in the half-darkness. I would look up and see really amazing and exotic and varied things on the screen, then look around and still…classmates feverishly jotting down notes. I couldn’t understand anything. So I gathered the courage: Mrs. Peterman needed to know. She would have a solution. I got up, walked to her desk, and in the best I could muster, said, “I don’t speak English.” She looked up, expressionless, and replied, “Go back to your seat.”
It sounds angsty all together now, doesn’t it? But it isn’t so bad. Like I heard Stephen Colbert say once, ‘Tragedy + Time = Comedy. There is a definite aftertaste of comedy in all this. The biggest pearl with which Mrs. Peterman endowed me, and which sort of exonerates her in my memory, is that she taught us one of the cheesiest things that will forever inhabit my brain. Petula Clark’s song “Downtown”? Fabulous. Petula Clark’s song “Downtown” with the word “Downtown” replaced by “King High” – to make it some forced, rah-rah anthem to our junior high? Absolute cheese.
So Mrs. Peterman did me a few favors. First, that if I could understand “Go back to your seat.” already, I was going to be fine. Somewhere within me, I could decode English with my German or Spanish, or maybe body language is the biggest decoder ring of all. Second, she taught me in the coldest and most unfriendly way to suck it up. It is the perfect lesson because you can’t negotiate with or argue back to cold like you would to maternal. And lastly, hello! Music can solve almost everything – it may very well be the place you can go to, to forget all your cares.
Downtown - performed by Petula Clark, written by Tony Hatch
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx06XNfDvk0