Kennedy High School - Maze Yearbook (Bellmore, NY)

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Somewhere out there, in California perhaps, beyond the scanning lines of your T.V. screen, there is a high school. This is the high school stud- ied by advertising agencies, selected by movie directors and T.V. producers, and ultimately con- sumed by you prior to entry. The archetypal high school. Contrived from the cliches and generalizations of Every-High, U.S.A., this high school selects its stu- dents and appearance carefully. It chooses not the intricate mass of interesting times and places char- acteristic of any individual high school, but the most obvious, superficial and sentimental aspects to be flashed by you in a commercial just quickly enough to offend you fnow that you realize ith and make your parents romanticize about teenageness. It's easy enough for them to assume what you do six hours a day without their presence, even if they went to high school 20-30 years ago, because they have been observing a high school even if they haven't set foot in Kennedy. What you get from high school is essentially what you want and work for, but since our desires in JFK arenit based upon real need, we let other peo- ple decide for us. Media. Our preconceptions of high school are carefully designed and pushed in the most heinous method - advertising. Televi- sion, movies, advertising and in our prophetic anxi- ety to shake hands with this blonde, blue-eyed institution, we accept them. It's really unavoidable - what we don't receive from T.V. and literature we get from our brothers and sisters, who have undergone the same process. Disappointment? Not necessarily. While Kennedy might not meet the expectations one might have of this projected, ideal high school, we co-exist with the novel let-down and can only compare experiences afterwards. This myth about high school generates a false, drug-like enthusiasm for something unobtainable, which usually heals after the sophomore year, but returns, traditionally, fifteen years from now as you dust off your yearbook. We hope not though. We really hope that for what high school was - and after all it was a rather long, long period of time - and for what high school wasn't, it won't be remembered as an over-edited thirty-second soda ad.

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