When I think of high school, stills are so important: it's all about the wallet with the kids - they define themselves with pictures, who they know, whose pictures they have. Yearbook pictures.
I was home schooled, so I never got a yearbook.
If I was in love with someone, I would get their picture out of the school yearbook and do portraits. If I was curious about sex, I would draw pictures of it. There were no books for me to look at. Then I would go find my father's matches to burn the paper.
I have a hard time watching the shows now. It is like opening up a yearbook when you were in junior high. I think everybody looks back at their photos and cringe, and I get to experience it with everybody else in the world looking at mine.
I was the girl who did everybody's homework, but I was also, like, student council president and yearbook editor and, like, all-around overachiever. Like, I'm disabled, but I can do anything.
It's funny: I always, as a high school teacher and particularly as a high school yearbook teacher, because yearbook staffs are 90 percent female, I got to sit in and overhear teenage girl talk for many years. I like teenage girls; I like their drama, their foibles. And I think, 'I'll be good with a teenage daughter!'
Fever' was good for how young we were, but for me it's kind of like a yearbook picture. You look at it like, 'Oh, man, that's the suit I was wearing?'
I wanted to be the first girl in my class to get married. From the seventh grade on, I used to write in my yearbook under each senior's picture, 'married' or 'engaged.' I had marriage on the brain.
I went to James Monroe High School, a big school in the East Bronx. My first promotion was the first alumni reunion dance. I got all the names and addresses out of the yearbook. It came off very well.
I feel like, maybe in the '90s, 'Rookie' would have been shamed for trying to reach a lot of people or trying to be 'mainstream', but I'm so pleased that our readers are happy to see me promoting the 'Rookie' yearbook on TV or whatever.
