Your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
Author: Kansas City teen author Terri
Date: 1972
Discovered at: Westport estate sale
The Cover Promises:
"1/2 Frosh Year + Soph Summer"
Representative Quotes:
Wednesday, March 22: "Me and Amy found what we were looking for. BOYS."
"Today was just another day," teen diarist Terri writes early in March 1972. The freshman student's year had dawned with heartache and controversy: her crush on Mark, an indifferent turd from another school, and her fight with Patti, a mean-spirited ex-friend who maintained a list of classmates she suspected might be gay.
By March, though, Terri's life had settled down -- perhaps too much.
As if to emphasize the rut she lagged in, on the 22nd Terri commited to paper the diary equivalent of one of those "Previously on ... " TV show recaps:
Winter seems to have caught up with her. She complains of the cold ("It was cold today in the 30s. This Kansas weather!"). Twice in March she takes ill, once with "diaphreaa and throwing up." On March 13 she announces, "Had the Monday blahs!" That's a step up from the 12th, a day so rainy and bleak that Terri's ennui finally explodes:
"After they went golfing, mom had [another couple] over for steaks. We kids played Careers. It is really fun to play.I need Love!"
So, Terri was ready for spring, that season of rebirth and hormones, but spring hardly seemed ready for Terri. "Nothin happened," she writes on Wednesday, March 8. She writes the same on March 13, 14 and 15, and then again on the last Sunday and Monday of the month.
But a funny thing did happen to Terri this March -- a burst of the best not nothin' imaginable.
Terri blossomed at last at a mixer at Rockhurst on Friday, the 24th. She prepped for the party with a trip to Cook's ("I got blush, lipstick, 2 turntables, and this thing for mom for mother's day.") The mixer itself starts unpromisingly.
"I hung around with Mary H. and Rosemary until Mary said 'Terri, you're getting on our nerves.' So Amy and I walked away. I started to cry and Amy did too. Amy took my hand."
Turns out, nasty ol' Patti was behind this, somehow, but, honestly, I can't make out exactly how.
But enough drama! Let's flower!
"I met a lot of new boys," she writes. "I talked to them all night."
Her favorite? Mark S., with whom she quickly bonded using a timeworn technique: bagging on a common acquaintance.
"I kept bugging Mark about Patti until I felt something towards him, a warm feeling when I talked to him. I realized I liked him and really hoped he likes me. He held my hand as he spelled my name out and we looked each other in the eyes. I think he felt the same way about me, who knows?"
After one final outbreak of trouble and tears -- this time from friend Sue, whose crush ignored her all night -- Terri finds herself close to New Mark.
"He and I were the only ones there. I said good-bye as Rick pulled him away. I knew I loved him. I yelled out 'I'm in love with Mark B!' as I walked to Bird's car. I hope Mark heard me.Well it was some night. Me and Amy found what we were looking for. Boys."
That was the 24th. Nowhere else in the journal this far has she written with such tenderness. Still, never an especially committed diarist, Terri does not mention New Mark in the rest of the month.
Other Terri highlights from March:
March 9: "Mom bought me a beautiful navy blue and red hip-huggers."
March 11: "Went bowling with Joannie, Bird, and me. Went to Ward Parkway and met two boys who were about in 7th grade. One was real cute and we kinda took a likein to one another. When we left I just said by and that was that."
March 16: "I wore my wig today. All my close friends liked it on me. "
Terri, Cultural Critic:
Fiddler on the Roof: "pretty good"
Cabaret: "It was a pretty dirty movie. Judy Garland's daughter was the star. Saw it at the Brookside. Saw a guy who kept looken at me."
Sally Slade[?]: "It was good"
"Was going to see What's up Doc? with Barbara Steindard and Ryan O'ynell in it but Amy couldn't go."
"Beth and I made popcorn and watched the 10:30 movie King of Kings (the story of Jesus.)"
What's next for young Terri? Fights with Patti? Love with New Mark? Watching The Ten Commandments on Easter? Check back next month!
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Love Studies in Crap, Alan. But this diary invasion is getting creepy. Not to mention shooting fish in a barrel.
I'm starting to feel for Terri. Didn't you say a couple months ago that she shouts all the time?
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