2010 Texas Girlfriend Tour: High School Reunion

FBHS 30 year Reunion - Class of '66
excerpt from an old journal 7/1/96
It's been an emotional weekend. When I see these people, the ones I grew up with, it's always like looking at my teenage self from someone else's eyes. And then, too, it makes me sad that my children did not have the childhood that I had.

I'm trying to sort the feelings of being in that room filled with people who orbited my life through so many important years. It's not a love for each other, I think, that we feel so much, but more the love of the innocence we all shared. And my sadness for my own children stems from that - That they didn't have the innocent years, the safe-from-life years, that we shared. Their memories will be of who they kept from committing suicide, who helped what 15 yr old girl through her labor, who OD'd. Of outsmarting the armed guard in the school hallways.

Then too, the Class of 1966. Vietnam. Through our innocence, right behind the door, waiting, was the certainty that some of us would soon be dead. Or worse. But in February, 1965, I was in a government class at Carroll high school, and the teacher wrote on the board: MIA POW and I had no idea what that meant. I'd never heard the word marijuana. I'd not heard the phrase "uptight." And I still teased my hair every morning.

Three years later, living in Houston, selling decoupage in Market Square, going on dates to free soup lines for a lark, hanging out with all sorts of night people, Flour Bluff was just a story I'd read long ago. My nickname was Ruby Tuesday.. Ruby because for some reason I would never tell anyone my name. So they picked my name from the song.. "Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday, who could pin a name on you.." I think it was my way of getting out of the Bluff. Of finally being someplace where no one knew my name and had no way of finding out my name. My first chance to try on different "me" faces. And lordy, did I try on a few. I was 20 years old, and I could do anything.

So, now.. All these years later, and I'm in the room with Charlene, Brock, Candy, Phillip, Dwain, Joyce.. People who were, at different times, regular actors in my teenage life, and it seems that once again I realize people don't cross paths without meaning.

Some stars of the Texas Girlfriend Tour