One July afternoon when I was fifteen I went for a walk with V. When we got to the creek everyone was afraid to get naked, except V. She stripped and waded into the water while the others laughed and shouted and pointed at her from the bank. As we were going back across the field V. The sky was a deep rich blue, the color of stained glass, and the sun rode high in the swollen clouds like a big gold pocketwatch. We undressed each other, began kissing, fumbling.
Account Options
Personal. Political. Provocative. Ad-free.
He wakes up one day and is seventeen again and gets the chance to rewrite his life. To avoid the consequences, he must now work with an old college friend and help the police arrest a local drug exporter. While fleeing, they learn the secret of their shaky alliance: Neither knew that the other was an undercover agent. He thought he wrote about the future but it really was the past. In his novel, a mysterious train left for every once in a while
Correspondence
In , Sister John Bono, fourth grade teacher, conducted an art project that involved ironing. Not surprisingly, a girl got burned when the iron tipped over and seared her wrist. Sister John Bono sent the girl to the nun house for first aid. The nun held the dishtowel in place with a rubber band she had taken from the morning paper.
Billed as "a brass-knuckle punch in its startling revelation of teenage savages" and based on the book of the same name by Evan Hunter — aka crime writer Ed McBain — who drew on his own experiences as a teacher in the Bronx — Blackboard Jungle ushered in the age of the teenage delinquent. In London, Brooks's film attracted crowds of Teddy Boys, who slashed cinema seats, danced in the aisles and actually started a riot. The reason for such shocking behaviour wasn't so much the film's content, which today garners a more sober 12 rating, but because of the use of Bill Haley and the Comets' early rock'n'roll hit Rock Around the Clock, which played over the opening credits. Today, it is the least shocking aspect of a film that touches on knife crime, drug use and even rape within the state school system, but back then it was a touchstone for disaffected youth, never mind the fact that Haley was a journeying white musician in his 30s and the song was already a year old. Nearly 60s years later it still packs a punch, with Glenn Ford's Richard Dadier so called mainly to allow the jive-talking students to call him "Daddy-O" struggling to control his pupils at the fictional North Manual high school. Others try and fail, like the pitiful Mr Edwards whose prized 78s are smashed by his class in a symbolic and still upsetting act of rebellion, but hope exists in the form of African-American Gregory Miller, who finally responds to Dadier's patrician authority. Nevertheless, for all its postwar morality, Vic Morrow's surly Artie West is the film's real antihero, leather-jacketed and blank, the logical heir to Marlon Brando's Wild One of just two years earlier. Damon Wise.
