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August 02, 2008 |
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CONFIDENTIAL!!!
FOUND by Alyssa Symonds
in Maine
I have been holding onto this gem for several years. I found it in an old book and it has fascinated me for as long as I have had it. I was so pleased when I stumbled upon this site and discovered a place where I could share this! Poor Andrae, hopefully her dad got better and she was able to get her gym clothes.
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Journal Entry October 02, 2007 |
Blue Whale June 10, 2007 |
Love January 16, 2007 |
I'm Just Thinking... November 03, 2002 |
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We collect FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework,
to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles -
anything that gives a glimpse into someone
else's life. Anything goes...
does anyone else think they have seen this one before???
School secretaries know everything about everybody.
This is obviously very old. Andrea would be old enough to have kids (maybe grandkids) of her own in school. I can't help but wonder where her life has gone. Did she get stronger as a result of her family's struggles, or did she turn to self medicating?
WOW! This is very old...not being able to save or buy a gym suit(shorts and t-shirt for $3.50) with his/her school logo on it is just...terribly sad. I feel for this family as I've been there myself, although my son's gym clothes were $28.00.
I hope and pray this family made it through better times.
when i went to catholic school in pickering in the early 70's, a gym suit was a royal blue bloomer like thing. i dont know if my mom had to buy it or not.
I do remember my mother not having enough money to buy my brother gym shorts and a t shirt when he went to high school.
"Not enough money" was the excuse around our house - for gym clothes, any kind of lessons, yearbook, class rings, etc. But my parents always found plenty of dough to pay for cigarettes and whatever they wanted.
It feels like Andrae's (male, Feeling in coherent! not Andrea) situation is different, though. Sad.
In spite of the obvious difference in era and cost of PE clothes, this note is identical to messages I see on a regular basis, through email from the counselors. However more recent policy is that personal information such as mental breakdowns or first and last names cannot be included in the message because there is nothing confidential about email. The counselor will write, "Come and see me about Andrae B." The medium has changed, but poverty has not.
When I was in school, we got demerits if we didn't have our gym clothes. Our grade went down with each demerit. The only "D" I ever got was in PE.
Our gym clothes were made of stiff cotton, including the shirt which snapped down the front. You had to wear them tucked into the shorts. (Mona, I think your one-piece bloomers would have been more comfy!) Everyone had white shirts, but each grade level had a different color of shorts, which carried through from junior high through high school (grades 7-12.) It was easy to identify which class was out in the field or in the gym. My class had white shorts. White shirt & white shorts. My mother bought them at J.C.Penney's. I remember very clearly, going with her to buy them before 7th grade. I don't remember how much they cost, though. My younger sister's class had blue shorts, lucky. Grass stains show a lot more on white.
We were assigned little cages in the locker room to store them in. We had to take them home on Fridays and bring them back freshly washed and IRONED on Monday. If you forgot to take them home, the teacher could tell by looking in the cage so you’d get a demerit. If you took them home but forgot to bring them back, you’d get a demerit.
I often "forgot" mine, apparently. That's why I had so many demerits, which earned me a "D" in 7th grade. My parents kept the typed warning that the PE teacher sent home, explaining why my grade was so low.
I hated PE and had nightmares about it for years after I got out of school. The women PE teachers were loud and mean and they blew whistles. We had 10 minutes to shower and dress afterward. Every third week we were excused 5 days from showering because of you-know-what. The PE teacher stood at the shower with a clip board, keeping score of numbers of showers missed.
At some point mandatory showers were eliminated from public school, apparently. At my daughter's middle school, the showers are used for storage of unused desks and tables. She actually wanted to shower after PE, because it made her sweaty and uncomfortable the rest of the day.
I am having a vague déjà vu about having written about this before. Was it the same find? or perhaps a different find with PE content.
My last year of high school, I took office service twice a day for elective credits. I used to hear all sorts of 'confidential' information and scandal and gossip. There were things I was just dying to tell my friends, but my integrity wouldn't let me--mostly I wanted to tell them that somebody in our school was in the witness protection program and I wanted to know who it was.
So much for confidentiality.
@Mona, I went to public school and we had the same hideous gym suits.
They were one piece, royal blue without an iota of stretch to them. The top part had short sleeves and a shirt collar, it snapped down the front, and then from the waist down it ballooned out like bloomers with elastic encircling our upper thighs. We bought ours (no clue as to the cost) in 6th grade large enough to grow into them, as we would be wearing them throughout high school.
The designer of this gym suit from the dark ages must have assumed that we girls would all have huge hips and not develop any biceps, because by 9th grade we were all splitting the sleeves, but no one had ever filled out the bottom half. Hideous.
Poor Andrae, as if P.E. didn't suck enough. Could not someone have sprung for the goddam gym suit? Even in the dark ages $3.50 wasn't exactly a fortune.
that's exactly like ours, Nightingale. I didnt have to wear mine that long, tho, because i changed schools. Thank god. Still catholic, but different gym clothes.
Clover, female gym teachers are always mean.
We had white bloomers. God help you if you started your period in gym class.
This find is heartbreaking. The tenor of the blurb attached is way too excited about this "gem". In contrast to the content of the note, it seems doubly callous.
@ Curious, I have the feeling that Andrae=Andrea. I can just see the school secretary typing this out "A-N-D-R-E-...Wait...Whatever, Andrae. That looks right." I like to picture her as the secretary from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"
Ah, the simpler times before there was "privacy" where institutions passed around everyone's dirty laundry.
Y'all think there's privacy nowadays? That's funny!!! There's acting like there's privacy, but everyone still gets together and talks behind your back like the the olden days, there just isn't any written record passed around like this gem. HIPPA my big, fat white ass.
Bitter much? Why, yes... yes, I am.
Luckily for me, I got hand-me-down gym clothes from a neighbourhood girl who had changed schools. Our school colours were brown and yellow. Barfff! And the gym shorts were short shorts!
we had one-piecers, too, but ours were a flimsy cotton. solid short bottoms and thin horizontal stripes on the zip up tee-shirt-like top. middle school colors were red and white. at the same time i had that one, my older sister wore an identical style in green and white at the high school. by the time i got there, though, they'd forsaken the uniforms and we wore what we wanted; i sported some really nifty matching terrycloth short short and top sets through the late 70s.
p.s. what did the boys wear? certainly not the same, but for the life of me, i cannot remember what they looked like in gym. maybe we didn't have gym together!!
lars, when i went to school, the boys and girls gym was separated... i mean, we had separate gym classes.
Nonsequitur in gradschool, I'm glad to know that someone else noticed the same sick quality in this submission that I did. The sarcastic tone of the title combined with the obvious pleasure the submitter gained from this depressing "gem" makes me want to vomit. This shouldn't be some amusement for random semi-alt kids on the internet.
@lars.. I also cannot remember what the boys wore. Strange, since all I ever thought about back then was boys.
I feel like I have seen this before.
Whenever I think of the name Andre (or Andrae), it plays in my head as Santino Rice's voice doing his Tim Gunn impression... "Andre? What happened to Andre..?"
http://tinyurl.com/6euljx
@Demerits: Thank you! That was THE BEST season of PR! Now I'm rereading the whole confidential note as "Santino doing Tim". Maybe that's why Andre went into fashion in the first place. They should totally have a challenge of restyling PE gym suits, dontcha think? Haha!
(I think Tim secretly WISHED Santino would.. *Do* him.. hee hee.
I think This new season is the WORST PR season Ever.. but last night's olympic opening ceremony challenge kinda came close to the gym suit thing??? I hate every contestant in this new season.)