Page 166 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
lascives. Mon père n’étais pas amusé et je n’ai jamais était très doué en français (sauf dans ce paragraphe, bien sûr).
• And there was one more thing for which I got in trouble, royally. At some point early in my high school career, I discovered that if you failed to go to your “home room” for the taking of daily attendance, then, all things being equal, you could cut classes with impunity. Well, all things did not turn out to be equal when, in the second semester of my senior year, Ronny Teitler convinced me to leave the building and spend the afternoon at his apartment (where I believe that he had some Scotch that he, not I, might have imbibed). The trouble was that I was known to Dr. Bernstein, the principal, who happened to be staring out of his window when Teitler and I went A.W.O.L., and he saw us. About two hours later, after Teitler and I had steadfastly refused to answer Teitler’s continually ringing phone, there came the proverbial knock on the door.
The person knocking was not a member of the administration, however. It was my father, who was truly delighted and proud to have received a call from the school. Need I tell you that Dad was not pleased? The result? A meeting with Dr. Bernstein. I do not know what made it worse: the fact that Dr. Bernstein knew me fairly well, especially because he and I would often speak before assem- blies that we would both address, or the fact that he knew me to have a sense of humor from listening to my speeches—and I knew him not to. In any event, I received a major dressing down in his office, during which he threatened that, if anything at all were to further blemish my record before graduation, he would inform Amherst. I managed to get myself through a major mea culpa and apology, taking great care to do so without once again demonstrating my sense of humor to Dr. Bernstein.
• In November 1960, the United Federation of Teachers, headed by Albert Shanker, held a strike for, among other things, recognition. (In Woody Allen’s 1973 movie, Sleeper, Woody wakes up in the
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