In junior high school I dated a Mexican boy a couple of years my senior. Be careful, my mother used to say. Where are you guys going? She was afraid the two of us would get harassed on account of the fact we were a “mixed couple.” At the time my mother worked for the ACLU, which always made me roll my eyes. There were other boyfriends in between, none of them serious. Then I met Danny Elfman.
Today Danny is a musician and film composer known for a lot of things—being the lead singer and songwriter for Oingo Boingo, scoring most of Tim Burton’s movies, even writing the theme song for The Simpsons—but in those days he was more into film and surrealism than anything else. Danny seemed to materialize one day at our high school. He was a grade ahead of me, charismatic and politically attuned, a boy who at least gave the impression he had a road map going forward. It was the fall of 1969 and a volatile time in the culture, to say the least. Our school was a microcosm of the world. There were demonstrations and teachers’ strikes. Lorna Luft, one of Judy Garland’s two daughters, was a student there, at one point bringing in Sid Caesar to direct a play. Later some people came to believe an actual cult had infiltrated the school, even though by then it was hard to tell the difference.
No comments:
Post a Comment