The History Tapes. The oral telling jumps to the early 1960s and with it more ammunition for the therapists to manipulate. A sixth-grade party goes horribly wrong taking with it my self-esteem as I enter Junior High School without friends.
Wanting a more grown-up look for junior high school, Anita and I decided to cut our hair into the layered look, the au currant style of the time leaving me with dandelion fuzz every time the barometer went above fifty percent. I wore scarves, like Audrey Hepburn, I fantasied, but wound up looking more like old Mrs. McCormick, our next-door neighbor who’d bang on the wall between our apartments when she was drunk, yelling, ‘You dirty kikes.’
With Anita gone and because of the Clifford incident, I didn’t have a single friend when I started Kingsley Junior High School, but I’d been placed in Honor Art and that’s where I met Suzanne, only to be abandoned by her two years later when her desire to be popular became more important than our friendship and I was left behind. Eventually, I found a good friend in Rachel. We shared our first sexual experiences, which for me brought back the memory of the rape scene from Peyton Place, the movie that my mother took me to see as a ten-year-old, the traumatic scene that profoundly shaped my ideas about sex and, bolstered by my mother's continued mixed messages about what "nice girls" do, just adding to my confusion and misconceptions.
You will find out about the sealed envelope handed to me by my guidance for my mother to sign but instead found its way to the bottom of the sewer, torn into tiny pieces.
The complete documentary Through a BlueWindow can be seen on my youtube channel shellfein1. I would love to hear your thoughts.
Thank you
