For Class of 2000, Little Has Changed Except the T-Shirts
The Class of 2000 had its freshman orientation this week at the high school down the block in Whittier. Things fell into two general categories: things that “rocked” and things that, in terms we won’t print here, did not.
The did-not-rock category was by far the larger, which was somehow comforting. In this age of AIDS and MTV, of cluelessness and fast times, it’s kinda nice to know that high school hasn’t changed a bit, and gym uniforms will be just as unflattering in the next millennium as they were in this one.
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Gym uniforms fell into the non-rocking category, as did the overall fall fashion lineup for girls. Everybody was sick of the hip-huggers and the navel-revealing “baby T-shirts” that were so trendy last year and in 1973.
The boys, too, seemed to be suffering from fashion ennui, slumping in the back row on their metal folding chairs. So many body shapes and sizes, so few options beyond last fall’s baggy pants, hanging tenuously at the mid-buttock level a la the Motorola repairman.
Being on schedule to graduate at the turn of the century, however, definitely did rock. At least one kid commented that she would reconsider her aversion to baby-Ts if she could find one with “Class of 2000”
emblazoned on the front.
(“It would have to be really, really tight, though,” she mused. She tried not to look at the T-shirt she actually held in her hands, a hideously shapeless white thing that was the top half of her detestable gym uniform.)
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Glancing around the crowd as they lined up alphabetically for their class schedules, it was hard to reconcile this cross-section of suburban puberty with the notion that these were the poster children of the 21st century. This was a middle-class neighborhood, but you had to squint to tell these storied adolescents of the future from any class of adolescents at any time in history.
Modern teenagers, the studies show, are using marijuana at twice the rate they did four years ago and mating like bunnies in the woods. Headlines indicate that they smoke like chimneys and cuss like Popeye, and kill themselves and each other with stunning nonchalance.
These poor, addled children, the offspring of the feckless baby boomers, are purportedly symbolic of society to come. But you couldn’t help but look at this freshman class--the boys keeping mum lest their voices crack, the girls air-kissing and squealing, “Ooh, I haven’t seen you in so long!”--without remembering that old phrase from French II about plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose.
No one in this crowd seemed interested in suicide or homicide, although a very few beleaguered souls could be overheard hissing, “Back off, mom, I mean it,” in threatening tones.
Nor was there much talk of sex and drugs, despite the summer news that some eighth graders had been caught with speed at the middle school last year, and that the class sexpot and the class heartthrob had coupled on his twin bed while his mom was at work last spring.
Some kids did need interpreters. This posed no problem because a number of their classmates spoke two or even three languages. A generation ago, this high school, like so many high schools around Los Angeles, was predominantly white. Now a candidate for student body president has to campaign in both Spanish and English to stand even a prayer of being elected.
And there were signs of the ways family life has changed. A few kids were accompanied by step-parents. Many came alone because their folks had to work. At least one pair of freshmen--a pimply blond boy and an overweight brunet--showed up with a newborn baby in tow. Their classmates, clearly appalled, pretended that they weren’t there, and they kept an accommodatingly low profile.
But mainly, the Class of 2000 looked like the adolescents of right now, which is to say, they looked the way freshmen have looked for time immemorial--gawky girls and wary boys covertly checking each other out.
“How’s it going?” they called to each other self-consciously in a tone of voice that said: How am I doing? Have I metamorphosed yet into the new, improved me? Can you see yet how much I intend to change the world? Does it show yet, how totally I rock?
How am I doing? Have I metamorphosed yet into the new, improved me?
