Dazed and confused

You're looking at a movie set.

The movie is currently playing in theaters and you may even recognize this as the location for Eighth Grade.

Of course, now that the lighting, equipment and make up trucks have all shipped out, the set has been broken down and returned to its original function -- the Suffern Middle School, my old school.

I haven't seen the movie, and probably won't.

I don't have much desire to revisit this period in my life.  Just looking at the building brings back a flood of memories. Mostly in the form of odors.

I can smell the anxiety. I can smell the tuna fish casserole wafting from the cafeteria. And I can smell the bathrooms, an unpleasant combination of disinfectant and stale cigarettes.

I also remember failure. As if being 13 weren't difficult enough, the powers that be at the school thought I would be a good candidate to skip a grade, at least in Math. They placed me in one of a very few advanced classes, Algebra with Mr. Scotto.

He was kind of a rough and tumble squatty little Italian guy who did not suffer fools very well. Never sugar coated his feelings. And every once in a while would take his high performing students to Yonkers Raceway for an introduction to Statistics. Yeah sure.

After one short month in the class, it became apparent I was not going to be putting $5 down on the Trifecta. So much so that an after school conference with Scotto and my father was in order. My father, an equally squatty rough and tumble guy from the Bronx was not having any of Scotto's suggestion that I didn't belong in the class.

It wasn't pretty.

They went toe to toe.

Aquiline nose to aquiline nose.

And in the end I was given a month to either fix it or get the fuck out. Pretty sure that was a verbatim quote.

I fixed it. Completed the entire advanced math regime in high school. And went on to take two years of Advanced Calculus in college. Then wisely decided words have more magic than numbers.

It was in Eighth Grade, in the building pictured above, that I learned perhaps one of the most important lessons of my life: you gotta do the work.

But I'm still not interested in seeing the movie.