On a lark during lunch hour today, I Googled my high school, ASL, to see if it had a website. Indeed it does. I'm not quite an alumna, because I moved back stateside shortly before graduation, but I did spend three years there. Some things have changed--they're building a whole new theater, I think where the old one used to be, but deeper and steeper to fit more seating. The website says it's a k-12 school, but that's not quite accurate, because it does have a grade 13 for our Canadian friends.

Essentially, the student body was expatriate Americans, foreign diplomats' kids (who wanted to go to college in the U.S.), and a few Canadians. It wasn't that unusual to be in classes with famous people's kids. In this photo, the person on the right is Randy, Judy Blume's daughter. Randy looks the same in that photo as she did 30 years ago. Come to think of it, I do too. Randy was in my class, as was Susie Landau (Martin Landau's and Barbara Bain's daughter). Sam Robards was a year behind me. A history teacher of mine used to tell stories of Marlene Dietrich stopping by once in awhile to pick up a relative (grandchild? niece?) after school.

I'm not famous, and I don't get off on name dropping. The facts are simply the facts.

My curiosity was raised, so I checked the "missing alumni" for what would have been my graduation year there, and the previous one, since my friends were about half and half my year and one ahead of it. The names of so many of my old buddies were on those rosters; many were not. Those names were only of people who stayed long enough to graduate there. My family was transfered back before either of us graduated.

One thing struck me about ASL that was so different from any local school system in the U.S. There were no cliques, nor bullies. No cheerleaders, jocks, druggies, goths, etc. There just weren't. There were nerds, for sure, but nobody picked on them. Most of us were pretty darn good students anyway, because it was a private school that required an academic test before application and enrollment. Those who didn't pass the test probably got stuck going to ACS (the American Community School).

I suspect the reason for everyone's acceptance of each other was the transient nature of our parents' jobs. Most of us were American, but many had parents who worked for one of the oil companies, and had spent, say, three years in Saudi Arabia, and other two in Libya before being transfered to London. Same deal with the foreign diplomats' kids. It's in some ways like being an Army brat. You learn how to make friends with others pretty quickly, and it's not that difficult, because everyone else remembers what it was like to be the new kid.

Though I do miss my London years in the mid-late 70s, I do not miss the bomb scares my school used to have once or twice a year. Some idiot would phone in a false bomb report. The entire school evacuated out onto Waverly Place and Abbey Road. The IRA was bombing London at the time. It was mostly pubs, but a bomb did go off one weekend in the basement of Selfridge's in the china department, half an hour after I'd left. Mom sent me there to buy a Wedgwood bowl as a housewarming gift for someone, and heard about it on the news right before I walked in the front door; walking was a bit faster than taking the tube, with connecting lines.

We lived there for part of the 60s as well, but in Mayfair, not Regent's Park. My school from the 60s is no longer there; it was on some mews just off Cavendish Square. Last I saw, it had been turned into stables. Perhaps it was stables before the school as well; I don't know.

When we moved back stateside, I realized how cliquey HS in my old home town was. I don't recall JHS there being that way. Suddenly, I was the nerd taking all the AP classes. Boy did my AP English teacher make a fool of herself when she introduced me to the class as her "new student from London." I stood up, looked around and said "Hi guys! I'm back." That did not go over well, and she depressed my grades for a couple of months because of it, but after a bit of a push-pull with the school administrators, she finally started grading my papers fairly. I forget her name--just that she had a horrible do-it-yourself frost-and-tip job.

P.S. Welcome, "Mr. B." Happy reading. Feel free to comment. Or not.