So are you pumped for the next Chaos Thaoghaire? As you can imagine, with all this candy inside us, we can’t help but be pumped. From our cold, dead hands, we always say.
As you know, it is thus:
Wednesday, 20th of January
7:30 pm
The Odessa Club, Dame Court, Dublin 2
5 euro for your head; body free with purchase of ticket for head
Theme: Epiphanies or “Revelation can be more perilous than revolution.“
Curated by Sorcha Kenny and Fiona Sheil
There are still a few spaces left on our booking list if you want them, but if you’re still unsure, don’t worry, we’ll still have half the spots open for people who arrive on the night. On a whim. By accident. Under duress. Out of pity. Whatever.
Speaking of pity. I mean, not of pity. Wait, I’ll get to the pity part in a minute. First. You’re going to need to be listening to this while you read what follows. If you read what follows, which is not required.
Last month’s winners of the Championship Belt (that’s you Team Quizeadoireacht) and the Spirit of Chaos awards (that’s you, the Eco-Elf Terrorists) are automatically put on the booking list, as are our current Perfect Attendance teams, Bleedin’ Scarleh and the Dr Leonard Sussman Project. That’s what we’d like to talk about with you now.
There is no essential information beyond this point. There is only pathos.
Yes, folks, Perfect Attendance. Teachers’ Pets. I (Jane) got an award for that when I was eleven. Well, not an award, but they said my name out on the school’s PA. Yeah, that’s right — I didn’t miss a single day of school. All. Freaking. Year. Because what happened if I was out sick and my day finally came?
All summer before I started sixth grade in a new town, I psyched myself up. I wasn’t gonna be the fat nerd whose dad wrote Italian words on her lunchbag so that at least she’d be able to go into humiliation-induced exile somewhere nice, who had Fruit Roll-Ups stuck to her bifocals, whose perm would neither set nor grow out. The one who was afraid of roller coasters and who still collected stickers. The one who was less upset about the existence of the No Janes Club, and more distraught that she wasn’t allowed to join, no matter how many times she offered to make them cookies. I spent a lot of time rearranging that sticker collection.
No way. That Jane was staying in her old town. She wasn’t welcome at a new school, in a new town where no one knew her history. The girl whose last plan to become popular involved making a baking soda volcano, then sending invitations to the whole neighbourhood to ‘come see my eruption’. I was gonna be Jane Ruffino, Popular Girl, probably even a cheerleader when I got to junior high. I had a Swatch, enough chutzpah to play Ado Annie in my school’s production of Oklahoma!, I was gonna fit into a cheerleading outfit by my 12th birthday, and I was gonna have people flocking around to hear me play TV theme songs on my saxophone. I was gonna be myself, and they were gonna love me.
I memorised the entire score of Oklahoma!, even the male parts because (and if you were also a fat child, you’ll know this) sometimes when auditions were short on boys, a fat girl would be allowed to play a non-romantic male lead. Sure, didn’t I star as Banker Theodore van Bludgeon, villain of the melodrama The Banker’s Dillemma, or How the Dollop And Trippington Railroad Came To Botts, California? Not only had I done all this before, but I had been in a play that took place in California. Surely Oklahoma was only half as tough for a Bostonian. Surely they would see through my corpulence to the glittering, clear-skinned Best Supporting Actress trying to eat her way out. Surely! This time! I read in a book that fat girls were good at balancing, so I got kind of good at the balance beam in gym class, and I pretended it was long-concealed athletic prowess and not my abnormally low centre of gravity. I was not stupid enough to dance, not even in private.
I’d been to sleepover camp, where a girl put spiders in my bed, where even the counselors teased me for wearing discount-store clothes, where every day we wrote down on a chart how many times we pooped, and the nurse would draw smiley or frowny faces next to our descriptions. I was so afraid of the spiders in the communal showers that I wouldn’t use them, but after seeing the frowny-faced scribble on my poop chart that said “Please shower!” I sucked it up and washed every day until the end of camp. When I got home, I announced that I was going to shower every day from now on because I was hereby preparing for teenagehood. I was going to be a real live girl, not just a genderless, sorry excuse for a hominid. I even shaved my legs. Or rather, part of one of my legs. I wasn’t allowed to shave them yet, so I figured if I just removed some of the hair, it would look like a razor accidentally fell on me in the shower. And of course you could tell. I’m half-Italian. Without depilation, we look Australopithecine, even in utero. With a streak of bare skin beneath my thick fur, I looked like a recently-inoculated orangutan.
Sixth grade was gonna be My Year. They were gonna see the real me and, in a moment of crystalline revelation, they were gonna start to love me, really love me. After all, what could be more yawn-inducing than a pretty child with hairless arms and healthy self-esteem? I had history. My Swatch came from Switzerland. And I had an absolutely massive sticker collection. It was a big mountain to climb, but my impending popularity would carry me.
My Swatch got stolen by a girl who pretended to be my friend just so she could come to my house and steal my Swatch, I was ‘understudy’ and member of the ‘chorus’ in Oklahoma (otherwise known as ‘fat child, cast for legal reasons’, although I did get to play Ado Annie once in a dress rehearsal). I got beat up by the girl who stole my Swatch and the sister of the girl who stole my Swatch. I got sent to a kind of fat-kid night school at a hospital where the other kids taunted me because I wasn’t fat enough to be there.
I got a perfect score on a state math test, which was also announced over the school PA. I was so embarrassed being third chair in band (since there were only two sax players) that despite my hatred of gym, I tried to blend in with a gym class that wasn’t mine, just to get out of practice. The conductor found me, picked me up by the scruff of what should have been my neck and dragged me back to the band room. Once again: I thought I could hide in a gym class.
On the last day of elementary school, we waited, chairs piled on tables and desks, projects half-torn off walls, for the bell that signaled the end of our young childhoods. The principal fumbled with the loudspeaker, and listed off the people who were to be commended for one thing or another, mostly actual achievements. I’d spent much of my year hiding from teachers and bullies alike, while simultaneously trying to remind them of my existence in case they were looking for a new popularity paradigm. It just hadn’t crossed my mind to stay home from school, but it equally never dawned on me that I had been there every day. The time had flown. It seemed like only a week ago that the students in this school, like they had in my last, discovered that my name rhymes with both ‘pain’ and ‘brain’. Not only was my perfect attendance record a surprise, even to me, but the public revelation of it was announced in a way that it actually delayed the end of school. Everyone glared at me, and I was under no illusion that they were jealous, admiring, or even pity-struck. No, I knew I was not widely liked. I’d settled back into the same place in the pecking order I’d always occupied, just below the bottom, but I was perfect at something, even if it was just showing up for my own daily ritual humiliation.
Nothing went as planned in my new town, but I turned up. Every. F*cking. Day. Not because I was optimistic. Because, in fact, I was this strange (but probably not unusual) combination of hopefully and hopelessly naive. As a nugget of advice, “Be yourself” only works if you’re the size and shape of child who can wear a ballerina outfit without provoking the kind of pity and horror normally saved for overmedicated circus bears. If you don’t — for fuck’s sake — try out for cheerleading (oh yes, I did). The more I tried, the less popular I became. Some things never change.
But I turned up. Just in case today was my day to be elevated to the heights of popularity. Just in case, on a day off, they decided to pack up and move the school to a secret location, just to get away from me. Just in case the star of the show collapsed on stage. I was ready. I wasn’t even the assistant manager of my own self-worth, but my god, I was ready to be called to the floor.
So what I mean to say is this: I see a lot of myself in the Dr Leonard Sussman Project and Bleedin’ Scarleh. Say what you will about them, but they have Perfect Attendance. It. Fucking. Matters.
And what I also mean to say is this: what childhood prize, accolade, or congratulatory gesture do you suspect was done out of pity for you? C’mon, best smiler, let’s hear about it. Because who wants a happy childhood? Who wants to peak too soon?
I auditioned for our convent school musical with paltry hopes of maybe playing Liesl — flouncing round the stage in a pink crinoline and getting to kiss one of the handful of boys shipped in from the Christian Brothers seemed like a surefire path to social promotion. But, alas, our drama teacher reckoned my buxom blonde classmate would make a better Liesl, and that there was really only one place for a tall awkward podgy ginger with glasses, braces and a wonky fringe. And so I donned a wimple fashioned from a white poloneck and the fearsome persona of the Reverend Mother, under the tutelage of my very own REAL NUN vocal coach.
Even my little sister, who had cropped hair and thereby had to don lederhosen and play Friedrich, had a handier time of it. I still got recognised around the town two years later.
Ouch! Ouch!
We definitely need to do some Chaos Thaoghaires about the desperation to be popular. I like to say I would have done anything to be popular, but at the same time, I really thought I could be popular AND be myself. Sigh. Totally misunderstood the concept. Still do, I think.
[…] On perfect attendance. […]
Amiee here, just wanting to say I think you’re cool. Spideog thinks your cool. I never had perfect attendance — my dad used to take me out of school to see movies with him. I do have a lot of embarrassing stories from that era involving bad haircuts. Very very bad haircuts. And a desire to be the next big professional hip hop dancer.
When I was eight, I wanted a perm. I wanted a perm and I wanted long, flowing locks, and I wanted bangs and I wanted to have hair long enough to have Princess Leia buns. I wanted it so bad it hurt. So my mom took me to her hairdresser, Judy, who specialised in the old Boston Dowagers but cut hair at a discount in her own basement, and I was all excited that I was gonna look like Farrah Fawcett or Wonder Woman, and I sat myself in the chair and chatted away until I noticed that she was *cutting it all off*. At the end of the day I had this puffball ‘do that looked like it had been peeled from the scalp of a 40-year old woman. I cried and cried and cried, and my mom was like, “That’s not nice to Judy! She gave you a very pretty haircut!” And I cried because I felt guilty because I upset Judy, who probably did think she gave me a pretty haircut, but I was eight, and I was just starting to get a little bit fat, and giving a perfectly spherical haircut to a fat child made me look like a brown snowman. Oh, how I cried for myself, and for Judy, and for my mom, and for myself, and out of sheer jealous rage at all the eight-year-old girls who had hair that lent their Wonder Woman Underoos some authenticity.
The next year, they let me get my perm. Over the two years or so that it took that perm to grow out, I got fatter and fatter, as if the weight of the fat itself was pulling the curls out. I still collected stuffed animals, and they had names and personalities, and I made them talk to each other.
Amiee, don’t tell Spideog any of this because while I appreciate that your cat thinks I’m cool, but I know her approval is pretty conditional.
Oh yeah, and I remember why they cut all my hair off. They cut it off because I got lice.
This is brilliant.
Because I was completely unable to play any instrument, even the tin whistle, with anything even resembling competency, I was named class conductor. I had to stand at the top of the classroom and wave my hands about. None of the other classes had class conductors. I was so upset when I was told that I wasn’t allowed to march in the school band with everyone else on St. Patrick’s day that the principle announced I could march alongside and blow a whistle when it was time to change tunes. I couldn’t even get that right.