Nobody’s Fool: A Brief Dating History

I remember vividly my first crush. Kelly. It was the 1st grade. She wore a checkered dresses with matching ribbons, I wore hand me down jeans and a pair of Pro-Wings. She sat in the first chair, in the first row, next to the door and the pencil sharpener. I sat somewhere in the middle back of the class. Anonymous. Unknown. I must have sharpened every pencil I owned 6 times an hour trying to catch her eye. I volunteered to sharpen anyone’s pencil, I brought extra from home. All to no avail. I began to doubt she would ever know I existed, much less the way I felt about her.

And then it happened. To my utter shock and disbelief she walked up to me on the playground one day…and then she spoke. To me!

“I am putting on a play about the Wizard of Oz. Would you like to me the Cowardly Lion?”

I grinned from ear to ear. Of course, the Cowardly Lion was a crap part. I would have been a much better Scarecrow or even Tin Man, but at least I wasn’t being asked to be a Flying Monkey. The Lion was a major character! Perhaps she noticed me after all. But this, this was bigger than the play, or the part, this was my window of opportunity!

I blushed and stammered my consent. I am not sure I actually spoke any English. She smiled and whirled around to assemble the rest of her cast. I immediately began planning.

The play was only a few days away. Not exactly a Broadway production, but hey it was the first grade. I would show her how much I cared. I would be the best Lion ever! When she saw me in costume, locked in character, doing my very best whimper, snivel and roar she could not help but see me as the missing piece from her young life. And, we would live happily ever after. That’s what I thought at the time anyway.

I ran home after school and immediately started assembling my costume. Let’s see there’s a 2 year old pair of yellow footie-pajamas. Cut the feet out, the arms and legs will be a little short, I’ll have a bit of a wedge, but for lion-yellow skin you cannot beat it. Hmmmm….a mane. I needed a Mane. AH Ha! A paper grocery bag cut with my Mom’s good scissors into a fringed collar! Now for the tail……Into the shed I went, and I emerged with a frayed piece of rope. My costume was complete. Now I waited.

The day of the play, I secretively packed my costume in a bag. I didn’t want anyone to else see it. The secrecy, of course, doomed me. Perhaps someone would have stopped me if they had only known. My plan was to change in the bathroom just before class began, so as to maximize the surprise. Besides, I didn't want to get upstaged. When I came into class, and my Love saw me (after all, she sat right next to the door) she would know how much I cared and instantly be smitten with me. Victory was in my grasp!

But when I burst into the door wearing my too short PJ’s and my rope tail with paper mane and with what I thought was an excellent roar, stunned silence greeted me. I looked at Kelly, and she lowered her eyes. Then the laughter came. First the back of the room, then the front. Kelly, even the teacher was laughing. People were crying they were laughing so hard! Come to find out, there was no play! There never was a play, none that existed other than in my deluded, love-addled mind and perhaps in the fleeting thoughts of one Kelly Napier. Thoughts she quickly forgot and discarded, along with the tattered remnants of my heart. I scuttled back to the bathroom humiliated.

Some time later, she had the gall to ask me to perform in her production of Little Orphan Annie. I icily refused.

“I am not your fool anymore.”

My bitterness over this issue, while somewhat cooled today extended long into high school. Regrettably, my future with the opposite sex did not give me cause to forget. But rather, it was a parade of humiliation and heart break well into my late teenage years. A pain that I stoked and nutured like a small fire, a pain that was as damning as it was formative.