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Once I moved into the first grade, life became more regimented.  Whenever you were ready to enter the school, whenever you were ready to go to recess, whenever it was time to come in for recess, they had you line up.  You didn’t line up by gender or by alphabet, you lined up in size order.  What were they thinking?  I was short for my age.  I couldn’t help it.  It was genetics.  Why rub it in?  Was it the aesthetics of heads going on a gradual slope from small to large?  If not, then why line up in size order at all?  It was embarrassing.  At the time, it would never have occurred to me to challenge such a concept.  To this day, I have a thing about my height and I know it all started in first grade.  I have no clue as to whether teachers still follow this practice today.  I wonder, in the modern age of constantly trying to build youngster’s self-esteem, if they realize the damage it inflicts on a child.

Thank goodness there was this very short girl, named Stephie Calisto, who was even shorter than me and as such, always had to line up in front of me.  She liked dinosaurs and that was the age where they fascinated me as well.  My mom and dad had bought me a cheap set of plastic dinosaurs but to me, they were real. Whenever we had Show and Tell, I’d bring in one of them and tell the class what I had learned about these fantastic creatures.  I single-handedly made my parents take us to the 1964 New York World’s Fair just so I could see the life-sized models of these beasts.  To this day, I still love dinosaurs. 

So even though I wasn’t particularly attracted to Stephie at age 6, I liked her and I liked playing dinosaurs with her.  I lost track of her a year or two later.  When my parents decided to make the move and take us out of the city of Philadelphia and into the suburbs, Stephie and a select few from the old neighborhood were already there.  By the time I graduated High School, there were seven of us.  Even though we weren’t the best of friends, there was always an unspoken bond between us that had come from our Elementary School.  There was Stephie Calisto, Molly Talbot, my friend Rick Buchanan and others.  We quietly and subtly looked out for each other on a level that was never spoken of.  I think if you asked these people down today, you’d be hard pressed to get them to admit the bond was there at all.  Yet every time I sit down and look over my High School yearbook their pictures jump out at me and I remember them, not as they were in High School, but from my very distant past.   I’d love to know if they remember me the same way.

I looked over my High School yearbook recently and looked at Stephie Calisto’s picture.  She was actually rather cute.  I wonder why I never tried to hook up with her in High School.  I am most curious as to what she looks like now.  I look to you, the producers, to find out.