Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 20, 1993 TAG: 9311110367
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I believe there is nothing worse than two old grads getting together for a jolt or two and looking at the old annual. If you didn't go to school with these guys, you quickly wish you were as drunk as they are and realize you would just as soon be in somebody else's den looking at the host's slides of his visit to the Amazon rain forest.
You are supposed to giggle at their senior pictures, marvel at their exploits with certain coeds. There are the good times, like when Winona Grandbody, who got drunk at the inter-fraternity ball, crawled up on the ice sculpture and took her clothes off.
This might have been interesting when it occurred, but time kind of withers it a little - although Winona appears in the yearbook as a blonde bombshell. But you have to realize she's hit 60 by now.
I have been guilty of the above, and I apologize. I hasten to add that none of the girls I dated for the inter-fraternity ball were the type to take their clothes off in public. They were girls your mother would have loved. Math major types. And they were, if you will pardon a bit of sexism mixed
with honesty, not generally constructed as neatly as Winona.
The reason I am now deploring yearbook watching is that I, for purposes of legitimate research, recently got out my high school yearbooks and found the 1941 Skyline from Waynesboro High School, where I spent some uneasy months as a freshman.
You can tell that I was not a big man on campus in those days, and if you came by some night, I wouldn't even want you to look at this annual.
In my picture, I am wearing a tie, which does not detract from the impression that here is a kid who was dragged to school that day by the town steam shovel. There is a certain desperate look in my eyes, but that may be myopia.
The primary reason I wouldn't want anybody to see my annual is not my freshman picture but two pieces I wrote for the literary section of the yearbook. These efforts proved (a) that I couldn't write and (b) that I was wrong in thinking that cheerleaders took to literary men as enthusiastically as they did to jock running backs.
I wish I had never dredged up this painful part of my past. But that's the way it goes.
I will be kind to myself and ignore a short prose piece called ``My Foretold Destiny,'' except to say that it seems to owe something to Rudyard Kipling, who would not have been happy about this.
The second piece is poetry. It was called ``The Cavalier's Vengeance,'' and it is bad, boys, it is bad.
You want bad? OK.
``This brave knight of brain and brawn
``Urges his mount to the speed of a fawn.
``He spies his enemy, bold and cruel,
``And promptly challenges him to a duel.''
That rhyme scheme is so bad, it's a wonder the principal didn't call the cops.
Somehow, though, I kind of get the feeling that Winona Grandbody might have liked it.
by CNB