Drink your juice.

Once in high school I had

this aging hippie English teacher who spent the better part of the school year trying to set me up with a student (who was gay) without my knowledge or consent. He did this by taking time out of the other student’s class lectures to explain to him what a wonderful girl I was and how many amiable traits I had in front of the other students, and I later learned that the keystone for his theory of compatibility was that both of us liked the band Bright Eyes. So sexuality aside it was definitely a recipe for a vital, angst-free teen love affair.

I bring this up only because it was a side-story I unearthed after remembering the afternoon that this teacher asked me to stay a minute after class to make sure that something I’d written about in a short story wasn’t based on life experiences (it wasn’t). Somewhere in the conversation, I accidentally ended up teaching him what an iPod was, and in return this teacher burned me a lot of Bob Dylan CDs, presumably to make me cooler.

Then one day in the middle of class, while we were all sitting reading to ourselves, he interrupted the silence to shout, “Miss Friar, do you have your iPod speakers with you?” from him desk.

“No, they’re in my trunk. Sorry.”

He then instructed me to get up and go get the speakers, which I did, assuming he needed them for some educational purpose.

When I got back to the classroom he pulled up “At the Bottom of Everything” on his newly-purchased iPod and plugged the speakers in and made me sit in a chair, facing the class, while the song played. I don’t know who that experience was most uncomfortable for: me, the captive audience, or the borderline senile part-time men’s lacrosse coach who was so bored with the prospect of teaching Young Goodman Brown for the the thirtieth time that he’d decided this was a good idea, but please rest assured that it was an enchanting three minutes.

At the end of the song he asked, by a show of hands, who had heard of the album before. One guy raised his hand, and my teacher said, “Thank you,” and then turned to me and mumbled, “Slim pickins,” like a palsied Rodney Dangerfield. I was then invited to return to my seat and continue whatever work I had abandoned there.

That’s all. Just a memory I have about growing up in suburban Connecticut surrounded by a lot of paternal people who believed in me probably too much and made sure that all of the gay boys knew how eligible a bachelorette I was.

It’s also not lost on me that this has been my second post in less than a month about how I used to like Bright Eyes. Adieu.