Ah, yes, Catholic school. I remember it well. That was when I learned that cooperating with adults did not pay off like you'd think it would. Over my howls of protest, my mother insisted I go to a Catholic high school even though I hated every day of Catholic grammar school. St. Anthony High School in Long Beach, California- two separate populations divided by gender--a boys' school and a girls' school. To keep you from having a boyfriend. Let me tell you it did not stop me for five minutes. In fact, students hung out of second and third story windows watching me kiss my boyfriend- his feet safely on his side of the line down the middle of the campus, and my pastel tennies firmly on the girl's side of the line.
I was called into the principal's office. She immediately noticed the hickey on my neck and gasped in horror, "He could have killed you!" She called the police and my mother, reporting that my boyfriend tried to kill me. (You can't make this stuff up - life growing up in the fifties) A policeman took her into another room while I waited out front and I guess he told her what a hickey was. She came back in and said to crenoline-wearing me, "Your legs look like toothpicks" (presumably because my dress was poufy).
Don't ask me how that comment resolved my early sexuality (which was necking, nothing more). My mother was mortified about the mark on my neck, which I had told her was caused by my falling on an iron. Really.
Ana
