My Yearbook teacher was a creep.
Woke up from a dream this morning and for some unknown reason my thoughts turned immediately back to decades ago when my yearbook teacher threw me off of the staff without warning or good cause.
I went to a high school which had just opened and many of the teachers were either very early in their careers or just starting. There really hadn't been enough time to weed out the bad ones so all kinds of crazy stuff went on. The Principal (married) got my German language teacher pregnant, told her not to get an abortion because he would leave his wife for her. She was like 5 months along when he backed out of the deal. She withdrew from the school. (Aside: the same year, the mayor shot his wife in the head with a 45 while arguing at the breakfast table, she lived and he stayed mayor.)
Yearbook was considered a privilege and was only open to Seniors in good standing. I signed up and after about 13 weeks of driving around to location shoots, sports, events, general campus grabs I got called to a meeting with this teacher. She said that because I had not shot enough film I was off the staff. Impossible. I shot hundreds of pictures. The log for this activity was kept by a student and full of casual errors but she wasn't debating. I was off.
I stewed around on what the real reason could be. This teacher's husband had a mobile DJ business and so did I. I had taken a customer from him early in the year and was after another one. But that didn't seem like the reason. He had a day job and it wasn't like kicking me off yearbook was going to make me stop DJ'ing in the same town as him.
This teacher was late 20s but acted like the yearbook was her high school clique. It was almost all girls. She rarely spoke to me. I hated one of the concepts in the yearbook and said so. Her concept was for the clique to pick 10 seniors and declare them to be "trend setters." Each would get their own sidebar telling the rest of us how cool they were and how they outperformed us all. It seemed very undemocratic and very petty to me. I argued against doing it. Not sure if this factored in. Though I did not say so at the time, I really thought this fit with her immature mindset. SHE wanted to be back in high school as a student and be declared a trend setter by her hand selected clique of girls.
Also the main theme for the book was "grabbing the brass ring" (?) which she had to explain to everyone every time it came up. It refers to old merri-go-rounds where you could grab for a ring and you would then get a free ride. So what the hell does this obscure carnival tradition have to do with high school?
Nonetheless, she wanted a picture of a carousel so I went and shot dozens of them.
Months after I was kicked off, the yearbooks came. I got mine. Open it and the very first picture you see, which was die-cut (mega up charge btw) was this round hole through which you see one of my pictures of a carousel. The rest of the book was similarly full of key pictures which I had taken...
I should be over this by now. Thought I was.
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