Apparently, when you ask folks to tell stories about a time they misbehaved, there's a good chance you'll get a tale involving high school and driving. That happened last week when Phoenix storyteller Dan Hull recalled a memorable New Year’s Eve for our latest series of SOAPBOX essays.
And we’ve got another today. Amanda Kehrberg is a Phoenix-based writer who often joins us on The Show to talk about pop culture. We’ll let her tell you the rest.
Amanda Kehrberg: I know a weird number of college professors who had truancy issues in high school. We wanted to stay in school forever, just not that school. Once we hit college we said, “Lock me in, I’m never leaving.”
College isn’t designed to lock you in; high school is. Universities are built like the estates of Old World aristocrats captured in revolution and repurposed to educate the masses. We wander freely up their spiral staircases and pull books from their library shelves and tread on their tennis courts. In cities like Bologna and Prague, palace buildings serve as lecture halls. In New York City, the largest private landowner is Columbia University.
High schools are built like panopticons, the hulking surveillance state that holds the revolution at bay. Today, security continues to tighten while digital technology creates new kinds of absence. The windowless architecture can obscure the sky, but it can’t keep out the blue light of smartphones.
We didn’t have smartphones in the early 2000s. My little Nokia flip phone could make calls and play Snake, and that was it. One time I called my mom when I realized I was wearing two different shoes. She said no one would notice.
My means of escape was much more old-school: a press pass. I’d been on the school paper since I was a little freshman, when my first in-depth investigation proved that we were actually in class a full week longer every year than our rival school up the hill. And considering their higher test scores and better football team, I reasoned that time was not only superfluous but possibly detrimental. My report changed nothing, but after that the principal always knew my name.
High school post-Columbine meant ID checks and restricted movement, but if you had a press pass dangling on a maroon lanyard, you could leave class. And if you had a press pass and a car, you could leave school. By my senior year, I was making up for those weeks of extra class time. My friend Dora and I would flash our press passes and head out to lunch or walk around the mall. This was back when coffee was still for office workers and not the sugar-bomb mecca of teenagers.
Dora had this adorable face that could get away with anything, and at 17 I had the withered eyebags of a 40-year-old, so we never looked delinquent. Neither of us was ever good at being bad. We had all the menace of two kids on their first day of Rumspringa, giggling as we pressed elevator buttons for floors we weren’t going to.
On one carefree afternoon, we were just cresting a rise past Blockbuster Video when I recognized a familiar silhouette: a black and white ‘93 Oldsmobile minivan, coming right toward me with my mom at the helm.
“Duck!” I said. Dora yelped and crouched down in the passenger seat.
And then, for some reason, I also ducked.
And that’s how, more than 20 years before Waymos hit the Valley, my mom watched a 1997 beige Nissan Altima miraculously drive itself down Warner Road.
In my pocket, my Nokia flip phone started to ring.
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We continue our collection of conversations about food and the holidays with a story from The Show producer Ayana Hamilton. She’s got a complicated relationship with Santa. -
Over the next few days we’ll be sharing some of this year’s true stories about food and the holidays, starting with the holiday season Kathy Cano-Murillo tried to help her father make tamales. -
Arizona storyteller Susan Lacke is an accomplished academic with fancy degrees. She also happens to be deaf. This is the story about the one college class that tripped her up. -
On KJZZ's SOAPBOX, The Show turns over the mic to listeners. In the latest series, listeners tell their own true stories on the theme of Misbehaving. -
On KJZZ's SOAPBOX, The Show turns over the the mic to listeners. In the latest series, listeners tell their own true stories on the theme of Misbehaving. Phoenix storyteller and teacher Carly Davis explores the difference between being bad — and being authentic.
