Hampshire Hello – glad you liked the Walmart coloring book that I could ironically not purchase in Walmart itself. You bring that baby to your next chemo appt and you’ll be the envy of the room. Too bad they don’t make correlatingly inappropriate crayons where:

Peach = WT pigment

Turquoise – meth lab blue

Grey – trailer cinder block

Red – Injun

Burnt Sienna – other kind of injun

Green – NIMBY

Yellow – smoker teeth

Orange – sunscreen overrated

Pink – doggy crayon

Purple – favorite fairy color (tinkerbell and albert in row B trailer 12)

Speaking of edumucated … when did school change so much? (segway to the latest from Upscale Mayberry) …

Back to school for the kids has the same benchmarks: pick out your outfit for FDOC, ride the bus, hang friend photos in lockers and go to class. But FOR PARENTS there’s things like Curriculum Night. I went to Julian’s where all the PTOglodytes were fawning all over each other working the room like state fair princess candidates. The Fanucci’s were there: being fawned over by some, getting daggers from the Piper camp of parents. Gotta hand it to Piper – she is the skinny ass svelte mom school version of the Cheshire cat holding court and completely above caring what people think of her. And she looks so damn good that she knows they can only really hate/love her. Good people watching.

Then I went to Sydney’s curriculum night. After spending 90 minutes walking her schedule, I needed a drink having logged at least 842,000 steps. Middle school math has changed. Middle School lunch has gotten way better (it’s like Grade Q salisbury steak went the way of VHS tapes). But middle school language teachers are so wonderfully exactly the same. Totally embracing the stereotypes of their classroom language nations. Sydney takes French – Mademoiselle Bernard is lovely like Celeste if Celeste wasn’t legit french and didn’t carry carafes of wine in her backpack. Although if Bernard’s got some prosecco in her water bottle, who would I be to judge since she subjects herself to middle school hormones daily. Bernard is coifed, adorable, perky, tres Parisian. The Spanish teachers chortle on rolling their rrrrrr’s and try to sashay like J.Lo or channel the panache of Penelope Cruz (admirable efforts). And the German teacher, built like a blonde human oxen, could easily work the bier tents at Oktoberfest.

I took German in high school and loved it. 14 of us took Herr Schade (pronounced “Hair Shoddy”) for four years of grades 9-12 plus the trimester intro in grade 8. Schade had awful hair plugs, zero filter and was awesome. His dad was in the Third Reich. He came to the states as a kid and somehow ended up married to a super nice lady while teaching high school German in my very blue collar hometown. Schade did total immersion before it was en vogue. I STILL sometimes have phrases pop into my head in German before English on account of him:

Warum? Why?

Bist du krank? Are you sick?

Spucchst due nicht! (Don’t spit!)

Zeigen Sie das Fenster. Point to the window.

In the interest of full disclosure, I also sometimes think “donde esta mi bicicleta” (where is my bicycle?) total rando, so hats off to my 8th grade spanish instructor.

The 14 of us were Schade’s plebian loyalists which may be why Schade got away with what would today be deemed educational suicide. For example, sophomore year day one we asked what we would be tackling in class that year. Jenna Kaplan – the only Jew in our German class and 1 of 3 Jewish kids in the entire school sat front row in her spiral permed glory as Schade told us: “This year we will be translating the Bible. Jenna gets the old testament. Rest of you can divvy up the new.”

Junior year Schade took 10 of the kids in Grades 10-12 to Germany as part of a legit foreign exchange program. I did not go as we had vaca in the books already. Jenna did go. While there, the US kids drank beer, which is legal for minors in Germany. Mrs. Kaplan (a force of great dearth and volume) found out, raised hell with the school board, and Schade got a three week suspension without pay.

Latin got its own room because that was the language that was supposed to breed future leaders – which is ironic since I don’t know one kid from Latin that went to grad school, where as many of the 14 loyalists went onto become a dentist, lawyers and my friend Nate is producer for an internationally syndicated drag show – which Schade would have had a heyday if a crystal ball provided him with that future insight. The other three Spanish teachers and Schade all shared a room: a vaguely oversized grey-walled depressing with no character glorified broom closet. While Schade was on his suspension, the 14 of us camped out with the Latin class for three weeks and got study hall during our normal German hour.

Schade wasn’t having it and files suit against the school – AND WINS back pay, expenses, plus an extra $30K for reputational damage. I know this because Schade returns to school where we now report to a new HUGE classroom on which the entire back wall is painted to be a giant floor to ceiling German flag. He smirks at Jenna while asking everyone to follow him. Our German “field trip” is to the teacher parking lot to see Schade’s new BMW he bought with the windfall settlement.

Senior Year starts out calm until Schade has a kid. He’s gone the day Anton Schade Jr. makes his debut. But Schade is back the next day where, for reasons that still baffle me, he tells the 14 of us EVERY push screeching, taint ripping, forceps probed bloody detail of the birth. German was our last class before lunch and there were 14 untouched Grade Q Salisbury steak trays in the school cafeteria that day. It was also undoubtedly the most effective hour of high school sex ed meets birth control ever. I was still a virgin, found Schade’s vagina chalk drawings edifying and left wondering just how many holes were down there? I always knew there were at least two, maybe three, but could not help but think maybe there were still others? A few redundancy system type extra orifices. When I got home from school that day, my dad asked me what I’d learned and I could not bring myself to even make eye contact.

Schade retired a few years ago. His son is a college grad. And Jenna is a very open social media posting born again Christian. Not sure how that works being born again if that’s not how you were born to begin with. Maybe it’s like how third grade Sam born to an American Hispanic mom could be threatened to get sent back to Mexico when he had never been there before? But she wears a big cross necklace in all of her photos and seems happy. Decades of Christmas dances and hallmark movies are tough to deny so long as women of all religions like shopping and chick flicks.

Anyhow, cheers to middle school German and Jesus, too, I guess.

Hope you’re feeling on the upswing. Radiation starts by turkey day right (I’m hosting, yikes!) and chemo will be behind you. We will then need to start the very serious discussion of just how big you can go (I say big big bigger!) for your new boobs.

Hang in there – xoxox love ya, Stormy