By Ann Winschel

All through high school I was a “good girl,” quiet, no trouble. I got good enough grades but was only 9th in my class of 82. Senior year was a lot of tension at home and by May neither of my parents was communicating with me. I’m pretty sure my Dad tried to block my college application but he didn’t succeed; I had been accepted to the state university.

Of the 82 girls in my class, 4 of us were going to college. The others were destined to get jobs doing secretarial work until they married a boilermaker and settled down in a two flat to have babies. Academically the school was a bust, four years of math and we hadn’t even gotten to trigonometry. It’s the end of my Senior year and I have never written a paper, don’t know how.

Every day for all four years of high school we had religion class taught by one of the nuns and we attended Mass. Senior year one of the priests used to come once a week but the previous year my older sister’s class gave the guy such a hard time that the priests refused to come back anymore. It was our last year before heading off to get married so religion class for seniors meant marriage prep and they had bombarded the guy with questions about French kissing. (I can’t believe that was even a topic. For heaven’s sake.)

My class had a new nun teaching us religion our senior year. The nuns had started experimenting with more contemporary habits. Most of them seemed to have just one dumpy frumpy suit, but this nun wore a different outfit every day. All still dumpy frumpy but an endless assortment of skirts, blouses, jackets.

This strange new nun didn’t talk to us about about religion or marriage. Instead she talked about Auschwitz, day after endless days of talk about torture and death. When there were only about six weeks left in the school year she abruptly switched to the approved marriage-prep curriculum. In lieu of a text book we were given a collection of pamphlets and papers. The Encyclical on Birth Control was there and a pamphlet on household pets which advised us to just have those little turtles that you can keep in a small fish bowl because they don’t make much of a mess. It didn’t take long for someone to find the pamphlet advising that we say the rosary while having sex. I refused to read anymore of this garbage and spent most classes writing out the lyrics to songs by Simon and Garfunkel. 🎶 Oh Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart, you’re shaking my confidence daily. . . 🎶

Our study was to culminate in a five page paper covering what we had learned. We were to compile notes on notecards and then write the paper from those notes. We were also each given a shiny, new, bright red, index card file box to keep the notecards in. That way, when we were married and encountered a problem, we could open our little red box, pull out the corresponding card, and the problem would be solved!

I had study hall in the library first hour. One day mid-way through the second semester I didn’t stop talking when the bell rang; I was comforting the girl next to me who had just told me how worried she was about her boyfriend who was in Viet Nam. For this deplorable behavior the librarian declared that I had the worst attitude of anyone she had ever met and kicked me out of the library for the rest of the year. Ok with me.

It was 1970, the world was wild, the city was wild, the class was wild, I was wild.

That marriage paper was due a week before the end of the year. I was getting more and more worried: I had no idea how to write a paper. Then the entire class decided that they had had enough of the Auschwitz-say-the-rosary-while-screwing nun and in complete solidarity we decided not to turn in a paper. Every single one of us.

All hell broke loose. GT got involved. (GT was the principal. She taught biology to all sophomores, where we learned that Jesus was born by osmosis through the abdominal wall, bypassing the hymen and so preserving Mary’s virginity.) GT commanded that we all had one day to write a five page paper or we would not graduate. New theme: The Presence of the Holy Spirit In the World Today.

Now I was really in a panic. What does that even mean? I had to graduate so I could escape my home by going to college. I had no idea how to write a paper. It was a desperate situation so I violated my eviction from the library. I pulled a book off the shelves at random, opened it to a page somewhere in the middle and started copying in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph. This was back in the day so our papers were handwritten. When I got to the bottom of the fifth page I was in the middle of a sentence but I didn’t care. I put a period and stopped. We all turned our papers in and the crises abated.

The next morning during the broadcast announcements, GT called me down to the office. Just me, no one else. The other girls looked at me with concern as I walked by them on my way down the stairs and to the office. When I got there GT was standing there waiting, my paper in her hand. My stomach lurched, I stopped breathing. She was ebullient! Best paper she had ever read!! Really quite impressive. She wanted to know if she could keep it to use for teaching. Just one thing: the bibliography was missing. Would I please?

I bounded up the stairs to the library where I pulled five more books off the shelves, careful not to include the one I had plagiarized, and neatly copied out the titles, authors, publication dates.

Two days later I graduated along with my class.

Bibliography
All material for this essay was procured from the memories of Ann Winschel. They might be off the mark a little one way or the other, but there is enough accuracy to designate this essay non-fiction.