Hi, my name's Ronni Brady, and I'm a feature writer with New York Eye, the internationally renowned humorous news and current affairs magazine. I'm known for my acerbic wit and laconic style. You may have heard of me – I also have a regular newspaper column that's syndicated across the country, and I've been a regular guest on shows like Letterman and the Late Late Show over the years.
Of course these days, at my great age, I'm something of a Grand Dame at the Eye, and I can write my stuff from the viewpoint of a blousy cranky old lady. This story, though, comes from a much earlier period of my life, a more naive time, a time much simpler yet quite complex...
I'm not a native New Yorker. Far from it, I grew up in small town Kansas. Let me take you back to my home town – let's call it Westvale – in 1960, and introduce you to a shy young lady called Veronica Brady. I'd just turned 18, I was in my last months at Glendinning High School, and I was a mouse: an academic geek straight out of central casting, small at five-two with a petite figure, long chestnut brown hair held back with an Alice band or leather thong, hazel eyes, a pale complexion and big black-rimmed reading spectacles. I never used make-up and, apart from my white bobby sox, I generally wore somber colors. When I looked at myself in the mirror I knew I was pretty – my eyes sparkled, my small pert nose was lightly dusted with freckles, and I had a nice smile and a dimpled chin – but nobody else really noticed, and I guess I never encouraged them to. Basically, if anyone had thought it worth writing anything about me in the school yearbook it would have been 'girl most likely to become the town's spinster librarian'.
I had some friends, but not many. Glendinning was the hipper of the town's two schools, but I wasn't one of the hip girls, with their Marilyn Monroe or Liz Taylor hair, their big rouged lips and gleaming Crest smiles, their big Playtex tits and their long, long legs. What made it worse was that I was Big Joe Brady's kid; dad was chief labor organiser at the town auto works, revered by the blue collar population, hated by the white collar classes whose sons and daughters dominated Glendinning. I would probably have been happier at St Josephs, where most of the other working class kids went, but Glendinning was the best, and only the best was good enough for Joe Brady's kid, he wasn't gonna have those management bastards and their snivelling scumbag lawyers looking down on him. He was as loud, boisterous and overpowering as I was quiet, withdrawn and underwhelming.
All the other girls my age chased the school jocks and dreamed of being executive secretaries, selling Chanel perfume or Dior gowns in some big department store and becoming perfect little Betty Crocker homemakers and moms, but I had bigger ideas. The boys in school barely noticed I existed and, to be honest, I wasn't really interested in them either. Marrying some grease monkey or store clerk or drudge insurance salesman was not for me; my ambition was to graduate school with good grades, aim for an ivy league college, shake the dust of Hicksville off my feet for good and start my real life somewhere sophisticated like LA or the Big Apple.
My teachers encourage me in my fantasy. I knew I was smart, possibly the brightest kid in the school, but I guess the faculty knew better than I did just how smart I was. While the other girls spent their leisure time in school practising the latest dance, trying out for the cheerleading team or comparing make-up tips, I could invariably be found sitting in the shade of a tree in a quiet corner of the school field, my nose buried in a book. My favourite teacher was Miss Grzesiak (pronounced Greezhak) – Lorraine – who took English classes. I loved great literature, and ate up all I could find of the Brontes, Jane Austen, Henry James, and so on and so on. Miss G had only joined the faculty about a year previously, and she and I had instantly found common cause. After one of her first classes I hung back one day to ask a question that I'd been too embarrassed to ask in front of my fellow students, about the motivation of one of the characters in Gatsby. It was the end of the day, I didn't want to take up her time, but my single question led to nearly an hour of stimulating conversation about the novel, and F Scott Fitzgerald in general.
After that Miss G and I were on the same wavelength, and we often had extra-curricular discussions about literary esoterics that would have left my fellow students glassy-eyed with boredom and incomprehension within moments. Lorraine was no small-town girl, she was everything I dreamed of being: a Bostonian, she had attended a spiffy East Coast university, had visited Europe, and had cut her teeth as a teacher in the Bronx and Brooklyn before moving west. In her early 30s, she reminded me of Shirley MacLaine, with short reddish-blonde hair and a cat's face with high cheekbones, slightly slanted green eyes, a button nose and a tapered chin supporting a wide mouth. She was five inches taller than me, athletically built but with an impressive bust, and had shapely legs with a dancer's calves. She was assertive, funny, sassy and superb at putting down boys who tried to play the wise-ass in her classes. The other kids started whispering around school that she was a queer and used to snigger about her behind her back – they wouldn't have dared do so to her face – but I didn't care a fig about that. I admired her like nobody else I'd ever known; at night, in the darkness of my bedroom I used to lay and think about her, not in any sexual way but just of me and her being friends, real friends, more than simply an encouraging teacher and precocious kid.
And then, one fine day, just after my 18th birthday, to my amazement it started to happen. Miss G stopped me as I was leaving class and asked me to take a seat. "Veronica, there's a show on over in Ellsworth that I thought might interest you. A touring theater company are performing A Midsummer Night's Dream next week. I was thinking of organising a school outing, but to be honest you're the only student I can think of who would be likely to really appreciate it. So I wondered if you'd like to come and see it with me? Have you ever seen any live Shakespeare?"
I was so excited by the idea that I could barely breathe, let alone speak, and I shook my head dumbly. Miss G smiled and said, "Can I take it that means you haven't seen the bard's work live, not that you're not interested in coming?" Feeling myself blush I apologised and said that was exactly what it meant. I'd never seen any live theater, well, not real, professional productions. Proper theater companies never came to our small town, Ellsworth was over 30 miles away, I had no car and no-one to go with - my folks didn't have the slightest interest in the arts beyond movies shown on TV.
Despite my excitement, and even though the invitation seemed entirely innocent, some sense of self-preservation warned me not to mention my outing with Miss Grzesiak to anybody. Because I'd be back so late I did tell my mom that I was going on a school trip to Ellsworth to see a play, and if she drew the conclusion from that that a whole bunch of us were going, on a formally organised visit, well, that wasn't my fault. I borrowed a copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream from the library and thoroughly studied it, so that I wouldn't look a complete dork at the theatre. My anticipation built over the next few days until, on the appointed Friday, I was almost bursting. I didn't have a class with Miss G that day but I passed her in the school corridor and she gave me a barely perceptible wink and mouthed "see you tonight".
