Memorial Day Musings

My passion for writing stretches back to my early teen years, when I first started keeping a journal and trying to come up with story ideas. My junior high school crush, Zac, and I would write songs and stories together, coming up with plot ideas and fleshing them out in scribbled pencil over cold spaghetti in the school cafeteria or locked in my bedroom after school. Zac was a huge Springsteen fan; it follows that the few songs we wrote together (he provided music; I handled lyrics) sounded like a dreadfully poor imitation of something you might find amongst songs from the Born in the USA reject pile.

Long before there was Beverly Hills 90210, Zac and I conceived our piece de resistance, an angst-laden, cliche-ridden soap opera loosely based on our pubescent friends and sometimes involving teachers (about whose personal lives we speculated wildly and I imagine were far more interesting in our minds than in reality). We titled our youthful masterpiece Fantasy Express.

The ongoing saga of life at a fictionalized version of our junior high school was born in 1984 and scrawled in Zac's boyish handwriting on a sketch pad, which I'm quite sure I still have somewhere amongst my yearbooks and other memorabilia of my teen years. The names were all changed to protect the innocent (namely our close circle of friends and a few well-placed outsiders) and to ensure we didn't anger said friends with negative portrayals. There were the requisite love triangles, low-level in-fighting and back-stabbing, looming doubts over chosen dates for formal dances and conjecture over what our teachers were doing behind closed doors. Our conceived romance between two married Spanish teachers elicited much commotion from fellow students of the alleged lovers, posing a challenge for anyone who'd read the "episode" involving la senora y el senor to keep a straight face in either's class.

The stories were not sexually explicit (who knew from sex in 8th grade, anyway?), nor were they laden with expletives or potty humor. On the contrary--they were fairly sophisticated for a pair of thirteen-year-olds, replete with flowing, witty dialogue and quasi-realistic depictions of suburban teenhood.

Indisputably, our finest episode of Fantasy Express was one that opened with Zac's pencil drawing of ominously dark clouds shadowing a full moon. It was our Halloween episode, unfolding at the invented mansion belonging to the parents of a friend. Zac and I labored to create an elaborate murder mystery, involving our entire group of friends (all clad in intricate costumes, naturally) as well as the manor's taciturn housekeeping staff and one somewhat stereotypical but nevertheless strangely sinister butler.

Yes, folks, the butler did it. Or did he? I honestly don't remember, but when I have time to retrieve the masterwork from whence its stored away I will certainly share the story's ending (and possibly some of its amusing dialogue).

A few years later, in high school, Zac and I worked together again, this time writing public address system announcements promoting our drama department productions. Last I heard, Zac was teaching high school somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. We met up briefly about ten years ago with some other friends but much has changed since then. I wonder if he's still writing?

Posted by ayelet at May 31, 2004 02:18 PM