lies my teacher pushed on me, take 2
Sometime ago, I ran into the peculiar back-story of a damnable video shown to my High School Health class for… no particularly good reason. It was listed as an example of schmaltz for what universe he was coming out of, and had been producing for.
I ran into another curiosity from my forgotten public schooling. Flash back from this to 7th grade Literature class, where, in the literature textbook, we read… some excerpts from a young teenager with a tough background who was now dying of AIDS.
Anthony Godby Johnson’s memoir A Rock and a Hard Place.
A memoir whose tradition will be duplicated with A Million Little Pieces, except Johnathan Frey’s book is more truthful. (He needed to fabricate a bunch of things because the story of junkie-dom is too much a dime a dozen.)
I… think this was what it was. It was from the memoirs of a boy with some terminable disease, and some things about the writing struck me, back then, as little off… not quite believable, this 14 year old, even as I understand the shifting balance of relations when confronted with death and the precociousness (high intelligence quotience, who seemed to be mouthing things that would be adored by the intended audience), I couldn’t stomach the the relationship with the saintly mothering character, who was oh so giving — and relented to give him a Playboy with its naked picture of Vanna White. I’m leafing through the book (with its afterward from none other than Fred Rogers, describing a conversation with the boy suggesting not to put AIDs into Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood to not disrupt the Innocence here) for some memorable passages to see if I have this pegged right.
But I’m not sure this was it. It may have been some other high profile book by a terminally ill child with the same basic attitudes that would endear him to Fred Rogers and Oprah Winfrey and on…
… and read in a middle school reading class for life perspective and relatability, because it’s just too good to pass up or too good to be true.