High school revisited
6:49 p.m.
I don't know if many of you have seen this movie. It's not exactly a Hollywood blockbuster, there are no car chase scenes, no explosions, no real violence apart from the school bully beating up on the nerdy kids for their lunch money. I was talking to Ed, the singer in my daughter's band, and he didn't like it because he felt it was mean. I think it probably struck a little too close to home and high school wasn't all that long ago in his timeline.
I graduated from high school in 1974. That seems like a lifetime ago. I was 17, having gone to summer school for two years and taken extra credits when I was supposed to be having study period, so that I completed grade 13, with honours, a year ahead of the people I started with. I really don't know why I did that. At the time, I think I was planning on taking time out, a year anyway, to do other things before I went to university. In reality, four years passed before I went away to study music at Western.
During that time I met a guy, lost my virginity, studied music history and theory, got engaged, went to business college and earned a legal secretarial diploma, broke up with my fiance, started dating another guy who had been my best friend in high school, went to work as a legal secretary (one year in a father-and-son firm, one year in a high-rise office building with a firm that took up two floors and had about 80 lawyers), continued with my private singing lessons, took introductory anthropology at night at the U of T(0r0nt0), sang in choirs, and eventually decided on what I wanted to do. So I started my degree at Western in 1978, which is where I met my husband and the rest is history.
Looking back on high school, so much of it seems like a dream, or like it happened to someone else. There were events that were significant, like when we put on The Mikado, or when the chamber choir cleaned up at the Kiwanis Festival. One of my greatest triumphs and disappointments was the performance our choir gave in conjunction with the N0rth Y0rk Teachers' Choir, which our director also conducted, of Healey Willan's Ap0str0phe to the HeavenIy H0st and the Mozart Requiem. I remember that it was in C0nv0cation Hall at the U of T and that it was glorious. I was 16, and I was enraptured.
Afterwards I really would have liked to have gone off with my fellow choristers to a restaurant or wherever they were adjourning to to celebrate, but my boyfriend, whom I had been dating since I was 14, was in the audience, and he wanted to take me out. He wasn't a musician (in fact he later became a lawyer), he just didn't understand the euphoria that accompanies an experience such as the one I had just had. As we walked away from the concert hall towards the subway station, I blurted out, "I think I love singing more than anything else in the whole world!" and he said, really hurt, "More than me?" This is why musicians, on the whole, do not have successful relationships witn non-musicians.
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