Page 164 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
the room and called on me first in class, on the assumption that teachers often worked in alphabetical order and would generally have dealt with me last. My best moment with him came when we were discussing the function of the stamen and the pistil in flowers. This was a time during which I was totally riveted by anything remotely sexual (some would say that that time has never ended), so I asked whether plants ever evolved to the stage where they became sexually differentiated. Although this had nothing to do with alpha- betical order, Mr. Zahalsky went on and on in front of the class about how impressive he thought the question to be. All I could think of was flowers “playing the field.”
• When I was a sophomore, I decided to join a fraternity, Alpha Tau, which just happened to be the fraternity of the then Mayor of Mid- wood, whose Alpha Tau sweater I had worn when I played him in the Sing. Pledging involved a number of stupid, but harmless, things but was to culminate with a “Hell Night” in Manhattan. My parents did not let me go. I was grateful; I did not join.
• WhenIwasonthejuniorclass’sLyricCommittee,withvirtuallythe same team as I had worked with the year before, we were once again consuming a lot of energy while we struggled to come up with a theme. At some point it occurred to me that the nearby high schools were all named for important personages: James Madison, Desider- ius Erasmus, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Tilden, Abraham Lincoln, and the Marquis de Lafayette (whatever his first name was). Accord- ingly, I proposed that the Sing be devoted to a biography of Irving Midwood. As you might expect, this was soundly voted down in favor of a Sing devoted to a meeting of a council of the planets to determine the fate of our high school. The net result of that decision was to cause the juniors to fail to win (again) and to cause the com- mittee and the cast to spend an enormous amount of effort fending off bad jokes about Uranus.
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