I Was a Star

"... this is my life. It always will be. There's nothing else—
just us and the cameras and those wonderful people out there in the dark..."

Remember that sad and skin-shivering scene from "Sunset Boulevard" when Norma Desmond is being escorted down the grand staircase by the homicide detective, and she is completely delusional? Well, not all of us can be film stars, but maybe some of us can be filmstrip stars. This is me in fifth grade "starring" in a filmstrip about the moon, part of a series called The World of Media.

Encyclopedia Britannica came to my school, Yost Elementary, and they needed a boy and a girl to pose with a globe of the moon. I was Mr. Shumway's favorite student for some reason--I wasn't all that studious-so he chose me and Gary Prichard. Gary and I were excused from class to go to the library and pretend to be discussing the moon, with my finger pointing at the Sea of Tranquility. You can't see that in the picture because of the angle of the camera, but I remember being told to point to a specific spot and pretend to talk to Gary about it. I couldn't look him in the eye, which you can see in this picture. I had never seen a globe of the moon before, so I wasn't sure what to look for. I'm not sure that in fifth grade I knew the moon was anything but a mess of dirt.

I was so proud that day. I got off the bus down the street from my house, ran home, sat down in front of Gilligan's Island with a stack of Chips Ahoy, and waited for my mother to come home from work so I could tell her all about it. I was a star, me in my blue cotton dress with yellow and red flowers. My mother made it for me during the summer before school started. It was against the rules for girls to wear pants to school, even though there was a full-blown cultural revolution going on outside of Yost Elementary--the high school had eliminated their dress code, the hippies were sleeping in the park, and my sister was dating a long haired drummer. Still, I had to wear dresses to school, sun or snow.

For those of you who are too young to have experienced filmstrips in school: they were strips of film an inch or so wide with slots on each side. The strip was threaded through a projector that had a soothing kind of hum. And as the projector advanced the film, the sprockets that coordinated with the film's slots clicked like a poodle on the kitchen Linoleum. There was no audio, so the teacher or a favorite student would read the corresponding script.

So, for example, if students were watching an Encyclopedia Britannica filmstrip about the moon, and it would advance to the still shot of Gary and me staring awkwardly at the globe, the script reader might say: "See here how this eager boy and girl are learning about the Sea of Tranquility."

For sixth grade, I moved to Westchester Middle School, where the cultural revolution had taken hold. Girls were allowed to wear not just pants but jeans, and we could touch the walls as we walked down the hall. Our principal Mr. Deller believed in allowing children to be free to explore their world, a theory which lead my mother to mistrust him greatly.

At Westchester Middle School, the library was not given filmstrips from The World of Media, so I never got to see myself on the pull-down projector screen, pointing out craters to Gary Prichard. By the time I moved to the high school, filmstrips had been replaced with newer technology and were now just little plastic cans collecting dust in school basements around the country.

Even though I can't even find a can of The World of Media on e-bay (I thought you could find anything on e-bay), I still have my newspaper clipping from the Chesterton Tribune. And for a few moments in the library of Yost Elementary in 1973 I knew in my heart that I was A STAR.

"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my closeup."

Norma Desmond