Rules for the Southern Rule Breaker Read online

  After preschool, we signed her up for the private school at our Episcopal church. The close-knit campus completely won us over when we visited and watched students announce their good times and sorrows, ranging from losing a tooth to the death of a family pet, at the daily flag ceremony. A few months later when Olivia was a student, she proudly leaned into the microphone one day and said her basset hound, Delbert, had learned to play the xylophone; apparently, he dropped his bone on her brightly colored Fisher-Price instrument, and she just went with it. But by kindergarten we realized it was not a good fit for her after all. Fearing she might not complete her daily tasks, Olivia insisted on getting to school twenty minutes before the flag-raising to get an early start. I felt her pain when I took her in at noon after a dentist appointment and was handed a thick stack of worksheets she needed to make up after missing the first three hours of school.

  My husband and I grew more concerned at a teacher conference when Mrs. Davis told us Olivia was confusing her lower- and upper-case letters on her A-B-C worksheets. Extra time with flashcards at home would help her catch up. She could suggest a tutor if we wanted to go that route.

  The child was in kindergarten and already needed a tutor?

  Mrs. Davis did share one bright spot, however, from a creative writing exercise the class had done the previous month during which they dictated a story based on an illustration of children riding a school bus. While most of the students espoused about the girl eating from her lunch box or the boys throwing a ball, Olivia zeroed in on the one dark-skinned student who was inserted by the politically correct curriculum publisher.

  “John was nervous. He was the only black boy on the bus, and this was his first day of school. He wondered if there would be other black boys or girls at his new school. He was scared but also excited. He was ready to learn no matter what happened.”

  “I can’t wait to hear what she will write next,” Mrs. Davis said.

  “When will they finish their stories?” I asked.

  “Well, we hope to try another creative writing workshop after Christmas, but I’m not sure we’ll have time.”

  By March, Olivia dreaded each day of school. This girl who was so outside the box was terrified of being caught veering outside the lines.

  “You only have three more days until spring break,” I told her one morning as I held up three fingers.

  “But three days in Mrs. Davis’ class are a lot longer than your fingers,” she replied. I got into my car after the flag ceremony that morning and cried. In April, she answered the math problem that would change the course of her young life.

  When asked to divide a square in half, Olivia drew a zigzag line right down the center. Mrs. Davis put a big red X across the square and made no effort to explain why Olivia’s slightly different but potentially correct line of reasoning wasn’t the right answer. The next day I called Sunflower, a Montessori-esque school near the beach in Gulfport, just southwest of St. Petersburg, and tried to make an appointment for Olivia to shadow.

  “Well, we always like to talk to a potential student’s parents first to make sure we’d be a good fit for the whole family before anyone visits,” Nancy, the office manager, explained. Nancy wanted to see if we spoke the same anti-establishment, touchy-feely language, so I told her about the red X on the geometry question.

  “We hear that kind of stuff a lot. We have one student who was taking a test or something at his other school and there was a sketch of a man without an arm. He was asked to fill in what was missing, and he drew a smile on the man’s face,” she said. “The teacher told him he should have drawn a second arm. Daniel is the kind of kid who thrives at Sunflower.”

  Olivia could thrive circles around Daniel, but we had to prove it to Nancy and the head of school, Marie, who also taught, drove on field trips, and likely sang backup for Peter, Paul and Mary in the ’60s. My husband and I passed their nonjudgmental judging, and Olivia was invited to shadow for a day. Sunflower thrilled her, and she thrilled Sunflower. The worst part was telling her she had to wait until the beginning of the next school year to start going there.

  Finally, the day came. Olivia arrived at Sunflower, took off her shoes, put them in her cubby, and joined all the other barefooted children for morning meeting.

  “Can I bring in a bowl of spaghetti that feels like brains for the haunted house this year?” Hannah inquired in August, even though the Halloween festival was two months away.

  “Can Linda’s group get some boxes to make snail houses again this year?” Arabella asked.

  “Why was cow poop on the school supply list?” Josh asked, eliciting snickers from the student body, which totaled fewer than sixty-five for grades kindergarten through fifth.

  “That’s for the garden. We call it manure,” Marie answered very matter-of-factly. She smiled and laughed a lot, but always talked to the kids like they were on her same level. To foster this sense of mutual respect, students called teachers and classmates’ parents by their first names. I still have no clue of Candace’s last name, even though she taught both my daughters. The school had only four teachers and four classes, excuse me, “groups” which were made up of kids of different ages with similar academic abilities.

  They learned Spanish from Nidia, a native speaker, and received music instruction from Daryl, a classmate’s dad who played the guitar while the students sang “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Octopus’s Garden,” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” Math in the early years consisted of counting colored stones called mermaid tears or measuring ingredients for baking cookies, while the older kids played multiplication bingo and blackjack. English also varied by age, though all students journaled every day with the youngest students drawing a picture until it was their turn to dictate one-on-one to their teacher or a parent volunteer. The first thing I’d grab if my house caught fire would be my daughters’ ten or so assorted spiral journals.

  Science was often taught outside by planting seeds in the garden or dissecting a dead sea cucumber that washed up on the beach. I started rolling my eyes a little at Sunflower’s relaxed approach to curriculum during the spring of Olivia’s first year when she came home four days in a row, reporting she’d spent hours sitting outside watching a chrysalis encasing a butterfly-to-be. Couldn’t she be learning to read two-syllable words or count past fifty?

  I walked through the parking lot to pick Olivia up on day five of the watch party (because car line is way too impersonal, of course), and she broke away from a group of kids to race toward me across the asphalt. “The butterfly emerged from the chrysalis, and we saw it fly away,” she yelled. “Come see the empty chrysalis.”

  I can still picture her dirty blond curls, dirty bare feet, and wide blue eyes as she told me. I don’t remember a single thing about the day she counted past fifty.

  “Oh, Sunflower. Isn’t that the school where they learn when they want to?” a neighbor commented when we moved Olivia there. It was a catty comment that was actually true and turned out not to be a bad thing. By the end of first grade, several of Olivia’s classmates at her original school were getting tutored over the summer because they weren’t reading on grade level while Olivia was consuming children’s versions of all the classics, like Moby Dick and Tom Sawyer. My mother gave her Shakespeare’s Stories for Young Readers, and she took it everywhere. Her love for the bard sprouted from Sunflower’s annual Shakespeare play put on by the third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders.

  Marie and Candace condensed the plays so they ran about two hours, but they were still in Shakespeare’s exact words. The students spent six weeks learning lines, painting sets, and getting fitted for costumes made from thrift store evening gowns. They practiced jousting with Styrofoam swords, made bloody and bedazzled knives and goblets, and painted portraits of their characters. Olivia’s roles included Hippolyta from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Casca from Julius Caesar, and Viola from Twelfth Night. Charlotte was the soothsayer in Julius Caesar, Caliban in The Tempest, and Juliet.
>
  Both my daughters struggle to tell time on an ordinal clock, and they can barely decipher cursive. But they blossomed at Sunflower, Olivia because she was allowed to let her creativity fly and Charlotte, our quiet one, gained confidence and emerged a strong leader with a love of off-beat music and art.

  The standing ovations they got playing Viola and Juliet didn’t hurt either.

  10. No Autographs Please

  My parents and I arrived at the bridge of the Queen Mary 2 at the appointed time to watch the captain maneuver the 1,100-foot-long ship out of a small boat slip in Cancun, Mexico.

  We were invited to this VIP experience because my dad called the ship’s public relations people with a few questions before we set sail. He was writing a column on the six-day cruise the three of us were taking. Before the captain’s show of maritime prowess began, his assistant told us we were waiting on two special guests who would be joining us.

  What? There were passengers onboard the QM2 with more VIP status than a columnist for the Raleigh News & Observer?

  Within a few minutes, in walked acclaimed actress Angela Bassett and her husband, Courtney Vance. I loved her in What’s Love Got to Do with It and had watched Akeelah and the Bee at least ten times with my kids, and five more times alone. I also felt a special connection to the actress because she grew up in St. Petersburg, where I lived at the time.

  As introductions were made, I shook Bassett’s hand vigorously and announced: “Guess what? I live in St. Petersburg, Florida.”

  She smiled politely but said nothing to acknowledge her hometown. To the captain of the QM2, Bassett’s husband, and the rest of the crowd who were thinking I was an idiot, I might as well have said: “I live in Topeka, Kansas,” or “I’m from Mars,” or “I brush after every meal.”

  I felt the heat from my red face and silently cursed myself for being too pushy as the captain steered the ship out of the narrow slip with such effortless precision that my father would later describe it in his column as “like he was backing a small Volkswagen out of a generous parking space at the Harris Teeter.”

  My embarrassment was payment for breaking the rule all non-famous people somehow learn early: Don’t bother the famous in private situations. They give on stage, they give on screen, don’t ask them to give 24-7, no matter how much money they make.

  I learned this rule doesn’t apply only to rubes south of the Mason-Dixon line when my former mother-in-law chastised me for requesting tickets from her friend Hal Gurnee, director of both of David Letterman’s talk shows. Even though my ask was on behalf of the local Children’s Dream Fund, which was sending a sick teenager to New York City, it didn’t matter.

  “Katherine! We are not star-fuckers. We do not ask famous people for favors,” she told me.

  I haven’t requested any free stuff from anyone since, but I admit I am still way too infatuated with famous people. I actually added a “Celebrity Corner” component to my frequent phone conversations with my friend Beth, who lives in Raleigh.

  I got the idea from one of my favorite writers, David Sedaris, who is quite famous himself, having written more than a dozen books translated into twenty-seven languages.

  But before he was a celebrity in his own right, Sedaris taught a writing class in Chicago shortly after graduating college. He added Celebrity Corner to his curriculum, so he’d have less class time to fill. In the book Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris explained that most students had friends in L.A. or New York who provided gossip about which band was about to break up or which movie stars were having secret sexual trysts.

  Beth shares my shallow infatuation with anyone remotely famous or infamous, so after reading Sedaris’ book, I suggested we make Celebrity Corner a standing agenda item for our frequent calls.

  Reading People isn’t enough; we like first-, second-, or seventeenth-hand knowledge of what famous people are like in real life. Sometimes we have a personal interaction to share, though usually there are multiple degrees of separation.

  She spotted Anderson Cooper having brunch in London. He was very nice to the server and in extremely good shape.

  I met a man in St. Petersburg whose cousin was Matt Lauer’s first wife. They had a very amicable divorce when their careers took them to separate coasts. She actually made a statement in his defense during his Me-Too comeuppance. (I don’t think it helped much.)

  Beth’s aunt was at a spa where Caroline Kennedy, Maria Shriver, and a few other Kennedy women were also staying. They had relay races in the pool and joked around a lot.

  Though Angela Bassett made me feel like a fool, the encounter was still a pretty good Celebrity Corner entry because I spotted her several times throughout the rest of the cruise singing to her twins, who were toddlers at the time. I never noticed a nanny helping her out.

  But soon after that, Beth had her own impressive submission. Her husband, Julian, found himself in line next to Gayle King during the 2005 NCAA Final Four in St. Louis. At the time, King was dating the father of Sean May, who played for UNC. This was when she was mostly known for being Oprah’s bestie, since it was several years before she became a host of CBS This Morning.

  Julian didn’t know what to say when he saw King, but he’d never shy away from a conversation with anyone, famous or not, so he offered up: “Hey, Gayle. How’s Oprah?”

  “She’s doing well. She said to tell you hello,” King replied dryly.

  Another Raleigh friend, Johnny McConnell, met Chris Rock at a mall in Indianapolis before a Colts game. Mr. McConnell is the father of my friend Elizabeth. His picture is next to “never met a stranger” in Bartlett’s Quotations.

  While they were wandering around a store, Mr. McConnell’s grandson told him he’d just seen Chris Rock and pointed him out. Within seconds, Mr. McConnell was by the comedian’s side offering his hand.

  “Johnny McConnell, Raleigh, North Carolina. Nice to meet you, Chris.”

  “Chris Rock, nice to meet you,” the celebrity replied.

  “So, Chris, how do you know my grandson?” Johnny inquired.

  After a who’s-on-first conversation, Mr. McConnell realized Chris Rock wasn’t an acquaintance of his grandson in the slightest but was a famous person his grandson had merely recognized. Rock got a big laugh out of it, and told Mr. McConnell he was a hell of a guy.

  My parents also naively hung out with someone rich and famous. Years ago, in San Francisco, they wandered into an art gallery that was full of well-dressed patrons and waiters serving wine and cheese. They helped themselves and pondered the paintings on the wall for a while before noticing Tony Bennett standing a few feet away.

  “Oh my stars, you’re Tony Bennett,” my mother said, in case he was suffering a bout of amnesia.

  “Yes I am. I’m so glad you could make it tonight,” the legendary singer said as he shook their hands.

  Turns out my parents had crashed an invitation-only exhibition of Bennett’s art. They were mortified, apologized, and headed for the door, but Bennett insisted they stay. He offered them another glass of wine and introduced his friends.

  Bennett’s picture is also in Bartlett’s Quotations, next to “class act.”

  It’s a feel-good moment when celebrities are revealed to be down-to-earth, or better yet, extremely kind. Knowing his acidic honesty, I didn’t expect David Sedaris to be a softie. Still, after the fourth time I saw him bring thousands of people to their feet after reading his essays aloud on a stage, I stood in line to get a couple well-worn paperbacks autographed when he was at Tampa’s Straz Center for the Performing Arts.

  As I approached him my heart rate spiked, and I reminded myself yet again of the soundbite I’d engraved on my frontal lobe.

  “We both grew up in Raleigh. Have you heard of A. C. Snow? He’s written a column in the paper for about 100 years. He’s my father.”

  Sedaris stood up. It was all I could do not to take this as a cue to bow at his feet.

  “Oh my God, of course I’ve heard of A. C. Snow. I think about him
sometimes.”

  “Why in the world would you ever think about A. C. Snow?” I asked.

  “Because he came up with a new column every week for so many years, and they were always good,” Sedaris replied. “I wonder how he kept coming up with new material.”

  In his book, Naked, he inscribed: “I’ll meet you at Crabtree,” referring to the mall near his childhood home and mine.

  He signed Me Talk Pretty One Day:

  “Sno’ mistake. We finally meet,” as a reference to my dad’s column “Sno’ Foolin.”

  I called Beth on the way home for an emergency edition of Celebrity Corner.

  11. Family Secrets Aren’t Meant to Be Shared

  Reach into the freezer to grab ice for your vodka tonic at any supper club across the South and if the hostess has children thirteen or younger, there’s a decent chance you’ll find a hairbrush next to the frozen macarons from Trader Joe’s. This is because lice and their eggs are believed to die after ten to twelve hours in subzero temperatures.

  It’s also common these days to see Ford Fiestas with magnetic signs reading “Lice Fairy” or “Lice b’ Gone” parked in long driveways shaded by tall oaks in all the best neighborhoods. When lice invaded an elite private school in Charlotte, contaminated students were required to bring in empty boxes of Rid to gain re-entry to class.

  The first time I ever heard of the blood-sucking creatures was when Mammy was berated by Scarlett’s sister, Suellen, for her system of decontaminating beleaguered Confederate soldiers coming home from the Civil War. Mammy made the men undress behind a makeshift wall of quilts and then hand her their uniforms, which she deposited into boiling water laced with lye soap.

  “I think it’s humiliating the way you’re treating Mr. Kennedy,” Suellen said of her beau, who would later become Scarlett’s husband. “You’d be a sight more humiliated if Mr. Kennedy’s lice gets on you,” Mammy warned.

  Today’s lice are not the lice that Mammy conquered with one washing. Lice of the twenty-first century are super-atomic parasites that appear to have grown immune to chemical intervention. Private and public schools across the country are grappling with students spreading it around the sleepover and sports circuits.