Jason and I were best friends for all of our time at St. B’s, a pair of misfits bonded early on by our aggressive rejection of whatever we thought was expected of us. We didn’t like sports, we didn’t (or couldn’t) compete for popularity, we didn’t much care for class work, and it showed. Instead we invented a private language, complete with verb voices, tenses, and moods that we had (unwittingly and very imperfectly) picked up from Mr. Caslon in Latin. We acted out imaginary movie scenes in the halls of St. B’s starring characters we had invented and featuring dialogue scripted largely during French class. We drew elaborate maps in Mrs. Gridley’s social studies class on which we played out epic battles between two space-faring cultures we had developed over several years–of course they spoke our private language. The galaxy-wide conflict only ended, incidentally, with an arranged marriage between the children of the two ruling families, an event memorialized on a velum scroll in the impeccable calligraphic hand of Mrs. Runyon. Though our classmates didn’t know what to make of us, our teachers, to their credit, quickly caught on. Of course they made every stern-faced effort to keep us on track and focused on the task of learning, but they also encouraged us to pursue and direct our creative impulses, if perhaps to avoid their use in the deliberate service of classroom chaos–a vice that was, to be fair, more mine than Jason’s. Certainly, our schemes to escape from gym class by concocting increasingly absurd excuses earned us a few disapproving looks from Mr. Muñoz, but, though we would never have guessed it at the time, he certainly knew what was up; and no doubt he was smiling beneath his scowl as he played along.
Jason loved to perform from very early on; it would later become the work and joy of his life. He loved nothing more than to be the center of attention and made heroic efforts in that regard. We wrote, and secretly distributed, parodies of the school songs, featuring the personality quirks and hygienic shortcomings of various faculty members. Those were a hit. In one extraordinary case Jason actually turned the classroom into a stage: he wrote an entire comic opera (heavily plagiarized, or perhaps “retasked” in today’s parlance, from existing masterpieces) starring himself, me, several other class members, and a visiting exchange student (Dominik Schwark) as a singing cow. We pushed together the little yellow desks to make a stage and held a performance for the class to great applause–as much, I suspect, for having blown through a study period as for the quality of the entertainment.
Jason and I remained close for many years after St. B’s. In high school, he introduced me to Elise Mac Adam who is now my wife. We talked often about our formative St. Bernard’s experiences–some triumphs and some disasters. But for all my ups and downs at St. B’s I have always been grateful for the things it provided to me: a love and respect for words and language, an ability to think logically, an abiding intellectual curiosity, and a powerful appreciation for the absurd. In retrospect, I owe St. B’s another debt of gratitude: for a friendship that not only enriched my childhood, but contributed enormously to the man I am today.
No. 35, Spring 2007, page 21