I was 14, in the 8th grade, getting ready to go into high school. We still lived in Boyle Heights. I’d had a few crushes and made out with a couple of girls, but I hadn’t had a proper “girlfriend” yet. And, it’s kind of hard to believe, let alone accept, that it’s been a quarter-century from then now.
This is one of the girls I went to elementary school with. Actually, one of the last girls I would ever go to school with because I went to an all-boys high school. You probably think that I’m going to have some cool story about how she was a girl I had some kind of a special time with, or that she was some secret crush yet unrevealed, or some other tale of teen drama. No dice. She was just a cute girl in my class and this was at a birthday party for another classmate. I had a brand new Kodak disc camera and I took a bunch of snaps of a variety of people. Unusually, this, and a few other photos, survived among my personal items through the many years.
I felt that this photo has a certain iconic air to it. She’s wearing the 1984 shirt because the year was 1984 and it was also our elementary graduation year. There’s a kind of “freezing” of time there. 1984 lives forever in this photo.
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