Looking back, I was actually cool in high school. . .

This weekend, somewhere in Iowa, there is a class reunion that will comprise a host of now-grown boys and girls  I went to high school with.  While I wanted to go back (I honestly did), I couldn't justify spending the money on a plane ticket to go play golf for an afternoon and eat a steak supper afterwards and then fly home on Monday.  I'm not that good of a golfer, and, while I know the steak in Iowa is good, I got on the scale today and I am about seven pounds heavier than I want to be (if they removed my organs, I would be the weight I'd like, incidentally). I'm kind of bummed out because I wanted to be the obnoxious, drunk single girl who makes an ass of herself . . . damn . . . In the end, I will be glad to have saved my money and the calories, but I can't help feeling a little left out.  Ironically, I couldn't help feeling a little left out in high school either (like the Senior Skip Day I wasn't invited to - insert frowny face here).

I've always been somewhat of a loner, it's true. My mother says even as a baby I was happy to spend hours alone in my play-pen. I think some this is genetic and some of it has to do with growing up in the country. Our house was a mile so out of town,  but my parents weren't farmers like most of the other people in the country, so that made us kind of oddballs (though Mom did have grand plans of getting chickens and eventually a local guy named Jack Hill - I thought he was Jack from "Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill" - would put a bunch of sheep and goats in our pasture) .  At the time, there were no other kids on properties near our house so we spent more time isolated from our peers than was probably necessarily good for us - especially when we were really little. We weren't like creepy home-schooled kids or anything (though we were pretty pale and scared-looking.) We had awesome babysitters who lived in town and I went to preschool with normal town kids, but my mom sent me a year early (I was only 3, the others were 4).  I think that hurt my social standing because when I didn't go to Kindergarten with all of them they thought I was held back from Preschool.  Really?

Growing up in the country was good for me because I had lots of room to grow and therefore lots of space to create and explore my imagination without many boundaries.  With a few exceptions, there weren't many jerks in my early childhood who told me to stop pretending or whatever crazy imaginary stuff I came up with  was nonsense.  I even had an imaginary friend named Tootie who lived in my knee.  She was very cool and I'm sure had she lasted into college with me, we would have gone out drinking together a lot!  (Thank God, she didn't though because that would have made me really weird.)

In elementary school I had friends, but I was always just an "odd duck," as my grandma called it.

Image from "Blondie's Lounge"

On the playground, I preferred to make up games on the slide by myself or talk to the teacher instead.  When Cabbage Patch dolls were all the rage, I was so excited to finally get one and took it to school to play "mommies" with all of the other girls at recess.  But alas, my mother was fiscally responsible and refused to buy new diapers for my Cabbage Patch doll when the original diaper Tessa Kendra (she was a redhead) came with fell off.  The other girls said I was a bad mommy and that my baby had a poopy butt.  I told them she was potty-trained (as my mother had instructed me) but it didn't go over well.  So I went back to playing by myself.

By third grade I was a legitimate weirdo.  I liked the old Star Trek television series (I wanted Mr. Spock to be my dad, though looking back, my own father had a certain nerd-ish quality that probably made me think he was Mr. Spock.) and Garbage Pail Kids

From www.imisstheoldschool.com

 and of course, when Pee Wee's Big Adventure and Pee Wee's Playhouse came out I was a sunk ship!

From www.geekshow.us

All of that being said, I wasn't as bad as some kids.  I didn't eat glue (although I did like to spread it on my hands, let it dry and then peel it off, making an enormous "glue ball") or suck my jello through a straw or use grotesque amounts of ketchup on my french fries at lunch (incidentally, for any of you who went to the old Epworth Elementary school in the late '80's up until just a few years ago there were still ketchup stains on the ceiling from that time that kid pounded the ketchup bottle on the table and splattered it up there).  My mom always bought me great clothes, including a Spudds McKenzie sweatshirt,

from www.askgoogle.com

bubble skirts, ESPRIT sweatshirts (and the real ones, not knockoffs), and one or two pairs of GUESS jeans.  I had an AWESOME jean jacket with wool lining, which at the time I thought looked like a pilot's bomber jacket (I was a big Top Gun fan too) but looking back I realize was more cowgirl, which is pretty cool too.  I even had a pair of short fringed cowboy boots with conchos that were all the rage when Bon Jovi put out "Wanted: Dead or Alive."  As for other cool stuff, I had lots of Hello Kitty swag, Barbie Dolls, Snorks and Smurfs gear, and a prized collection of "Sweet Valley Twins" books.  Just saying . . .

But one can only live in a world of her own fantasy for so long before adolescence slowly creeps in.  And if you can't roll your blue jeans cuffs like Theo and Denise Huxtible from the Cosby Show or jack your bangs up really high (with your portable curling iron that ran on butane and probably blew up more than one junior high school locker) you are in it for it:

 From http://theclassic80s.com/80s-hairstyles.html  (this is not me, Mom, though undoubtedly you will think it because you are like this)

This is the part where me actually being cool comes in because I never really fell for any of that shit.  When my jeans wouldn't roll up I said f-that and when the White Rain hairspray didn't work I just quit and went au natural. Others didn't like it because I was the lone wolf separating from the pack, but I survived.  The coolest part about this is that if you go through my high school yearbooks, I don't have any years that I look back on and go, OH MY GOD HOW EMBARRASSING!  (Which I never look through anyway, because I threw my junior high yearbooks out and can't find my high school ones). 

Actually, without knowing it, I was somewhat of a trendsetter and I like to think I was kind of Bette Davis cool (although this is probably a bit of an exaggeration). My sister and I wore our hair in scrunchies and buns much to the taunting other kids on the bus, only to find that two years later all of the girls were doing this.  I wore vintage courdoroys from Ragstock in Iowa City because I just liked them.  Two years later, in college, they were extremely popular.  I listened to jazz.  I read Harper's Bazaar.  I knew who designers like Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui were - not bad for a girl in a town of 1,500 people.  I even wore a Mod-Squad style 1960s mini-dress under my graduation gown, though, looking back I just wish I had been confident enough to really pull it off.

Thankfully, I was never really "picked on" in high school.  I was kind of nerdy because I was smart, but I was like a sexy, witty smart.  I didn't do well at math, which made my friends tell me I wasn't smart, but I was also smart enough not to get really wrapped up in cats (like books and stickers and stuff, ew) and those Vampire books by Anne Rice (not so cool, in my opinion).  I had some close friends but they were quick to turn (not just on me, anyone) and that was pretty much the definition of the social stratus of high school. It was actually more fun to kind of be-bop around from group to group when I could by with it. And those times when my friends would oust me? Looking back I might have deserved (some of) it.  Being secretly cool comes with a price - it can make a person a little arrogant.  I was "cultured" to the point of probably asserting my opinions on people a little more than I needed to, but I was just trying to make them see that there was a life outside of our sleepy Iowa community.  Some did, some never will - and that's okay. 

It's no wonder that I ended up away from there, though.  I just wasn't exactly meant to stay.  And it's not like I hopped on board the Greyhound as fast as I could.  It was a slow transition.  All that being said, being an original has been good for me.  It works out well in Los Angeles where I feel like I fit in by being different.  What passes for "different" in my hometown (wearing a skirt for example) is NOTHING here (a gigantic black man in a Playboy bunny suit, for example).  Being "different" and shunned on occasion made me expand my horizons and get to know people who were not necessarily the first people I would gravitate to.  This works out well in my singing career because you are always meeting new people - and if you give them a chance you almost always find you have something in common with them anyway.

So, Western Dubuque High School class reunioners, have fun!  I mean that in all sincerity.  By now, we should have forgiven each other for the TP'd houses and the soaped windshields and the jeering and mocking.  If you are still doing this to people, you are "so high school, like, really, and totally need to, like, grow up!" (I can talk that way, now, by the way because I live near "The Valley" and that kind of makes me a Valley Girl.)

I am considering being "different' yet again and hosting my own class reunion should I go home for Christmas. If you are interested in joining me in the Alternative Class Reunion because you live out of town and couldn't make it to this one, even if you didn't go to my high school and want to be part of the Alternative Class Reunion, please e-mail me at melaniedevaney@gmail.com.  Also, be sure to check out my music at www.reverbnation.com/MelanieDevaney and please, please please like TOTALLY be my friend on Facebook if you aren't already.