Just to show how sheltered we were
One thing I will never forget about seventh grade was that we never saw a brunette before. All the girls in our little class were either blondes or browns.
Now we have 3–count ’em–girls with seriously long hair black as a midnight panther. Hey, didn’t Delilah have black hair?
And they were all J’s: Julie, Janice, and Jocelyn. One of them even became our homecoming queen. If no one was looking (mustn’t look like a rube), you’d stop and stare. Geez, am I on Mars?
When you only have 15 girls in your class, names can only mean one person. Now we have ten or 12 Cindys, Loris, Lisa, Carols, etc. And names we never encountered like Roberta, Jody, Denise, MaryBeth, and SallyAnne. A few exotic ones as well: Gemma and Daris. You need a scorecard to track them. Every now and then, you’d hear and name and say ‘who??’ Our class was now 150+, not 30.
It took weeks to get people straight. You’d start remembering girls in your classes (especially ones sitting nearby), then you had to ask your friends ‘who the hell IS that?’ You never asked kids who would know for sure, cause they’d tell you a fictitious name to set up, and laughing when you asked about someone who didn’t exist. Augh! When did life become so complicated??