One Monday morning, at an assembly meeting when I was attending a girls’ high school, our school principal started the morning by having us sing our Alma Mater. While the song has beautiful sentimental lyrics, the musical arrangement is something that would probably challenge a seasoned opera singer. We began to sing:
St. Joseph Our Patron,
St. Joseph Our Aide,
May Your Dear Memory Never Fade.
Be Our Beacon,
Be Our Light.
Help Us Always to Do What’s Right …
A pacing Sister Barbara Joseph stopped us mid-mater. She was deeply disgusted by our tone deaf rendition of our school’s sacred Alma Mater. In Sister Barbara Joseph’s defense, while she was heavy-handed with us, we unquestioningly deserved every minute of her diatribe. It’s true we were a motley crew. Most of us had spent the weekend making out with our respective boyfriends (certainly I can speak for myself), eating a diet comprised solely of Oreos and Tab, and in the tradition of teenage girls everywhere, being incredibly self-indulgent. I’m sure left to our own devices, each of us would be in bed watching All My Children and talking on the phone. While Sister Barbara Joseph’s outburst would never be compared to a character’s from the movie The Magdalene Sisters, she shook us up enough to re-sing our school song well enough for her to be satisfied with our rendition.
It had only been the week previous that I had been called out in religion class for passing notes. Sister Mary Rodgers (the real life sister of “Rueben Kincaid” Dave Madden from The Partridge Family—great, right?!) intercepted the note and read it aloud to the class. As if it were written in ancient hieroglyphics that she had been heretofore unfamiliar with, she slowly, syllable by syllable, read the note aloud. “Miss Aussstin would like to share with the classsssss that the GGGGOOO-GGGGOOOs are in town.” Then she added, for effect, “Thank you Miss Austin for demonstrating your attention and allegiance to the Gos-Gos over Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Being the joker that I was and still am, I was tempted to stand and curtsy, but I knew that just might win me a trip to Sister B.J.’s office, and I wasn’t going out like that. Although Sister Mary Rodgers was my favorite teacher at St. Josephs, being the intellectual slob that I was, I really couldn’t be bothered to care about academics in her or any other teacher’s class. While even then I understood that Christ’s merits far surpassed those of Belinda Carlisle, I really was lazy, undisciplined, and intransigently sybaritic.
