The Okay Seniors

When I was a freshman at my new school the only person I knew was Sister, who was a junior, for all the good it did me. “If you see me in the hall, do not speak to me. I don’t know you. You don’t know me.” It was even worse with the seniors, who thought all freshman were annoying at best, beneath contempt at worst.

English 1 was full of freshmen. They were strangers, but also fellow peons, which at least gave us something in common. But other classes, like biology, or Spanish, had a mix of grades. I shared a lab table in biology with a senior who never looked at me, never spoke to me, in fact his only acknowledgment of me was when he asked the teacher for a “lab partner whose voice had at least finished changing.”

Even the Seniors Are Assholes had an exception. I found mine in Drama. Seniors were cast in my first school plays: Our Town, As You Like It, Spoon River Anthology, and others.

These seniors were friendly and supportive, but two went beyond that.

I first met Bob Klaffky and Carol Collins when I had a minor part in Our Town. Bob played Dr. Gibbs and Carol played Mrs. Webb. Bob was much taller than me. I had to crane my neck to look him in the eye. Carol was only a few inches taller than I, at least at first. I soon caught up to, and then surpassed her, but I still had to tilt my head back when I talked to Bob. I don’t know why they adopted me as their pet freshman, but my life immediately changed when they did.

I’d been a musical theater junkie since seventh grade when I bought my first cast album, Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza in South Pacific. I kept up with the current shows on the Great White Way, buying cast albums for shows I’d never seen, and probably never would. New York was a world away from Fort Lauderdale. I saw a number from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas on the Mike Douglas show and ran to Peaches Records and Tapes (now an adult sex shop) to buy the cast album–on vinyl, of course. I didn’t have one of those fancy 8-track players that the cool kids had. When Patti Lupone performed on Merv Griffin, I rushed out to buy the Evita sound track, which was a two record set! Twice the magic.

I was content to enjoy the songs without any context other than the summary of the play that was printed on the record sleeve or album cover.

One day Bob said, “Carol and I are going to see Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! at the Miami Beach Theatre of Performing Arts. Wanna come?”

When I listened to my many cast albums, I often regretted that I was born too late to see Ethel Merman, Carol Channing, Mary Martin, John Raitt, Angela Lansbury, and other legends. The chance to see Channing in Dolly? Hell, yes!

We bought tickets for a Saturday matinee. I was only fourteen, so Bob did the driving. On the drive to Miami Beach, I told them about my lab partner and his comment about puberty. Carol said, “Speaking of puberty, I hope someone warned you that if you masturbate, the hair on your palms falls off.” The urban legend I was familiar with was the opposite, that jerking off would cause you grow hair on your palms.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“One hundred percent,” she said.

I was confused. Do people generally have hairy palms? I held up my hand to inspect it, much to Carol’s delight. “You just admitted masturbating!”

“Of course I jack off. Everyone does. Even Bob, right?”

Klaffky looked uncomfortable and changed the subject.

Before seeing the show we went to Wolfie’s for lunch. This was part of their regular routine, but I’d never been to Wolfie’s Delicatessen before. It was huge. We arrived as they were switching from breakfast to lunch. Each table had complimentary bowls of cinnamon buns and other sweet rolls. Servers were going to empty tables and swapping the bowls of sweets with big bowls of cole slaw. Several women, on their way out of the restaurant, stopped by two or three tables, emptying the buns into their purses. No one batted an eye, but it gasted my flabber. I pointed to one of the petty thieves and Carol just shrugged. “It’s a daily occurrence.”

We ate our lunch and paid the check. As we got up, I asked Carol for her purse. “Why?” she asked, eyes narrowed. Instead of answering, I took the purse from the chair where she’d draped it. Then I went from one empty table to another, dumping cole slaw into her purse. Anyone else would have killed me, but she thought it was a hoot. As with the women swiping breakfast breads, no one gave me a second look.

The following year we drove to Orlando to see the touring company for A Chorus Line. I was blown away. I was used to Lerner and Lowe, Jerry Herman, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin and Jules Styne. This new musical was eye opening, both for its non traditional plot, and the songs. I had my learner’s permit by then and Bob let me drive his car while he sat in the passenger seat.

“The trick to not getting a ticket,” he said, “Is to only speed in the right lane. Don’t drive in the left lane except to pass; that’s where all the speeders get caught. You can go seventy or eighty miles an hour in the right lane with no problem.” Years later I learned the hard way that his advice had holes in it. In my case, a $275 hole, but that’s another story.

On that two-hour drive Carol introduced me to General Hospital. I’d never seen her face so animated as when she explained the connections between the Quartermaines and the Webers. By the time we parked I knew all there was to know about Port Charles. After that trip I never missed an episode of the soap.

The Galleria Cinema started showing midnight screens of The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Friday nights. We’d heard scary stories about the show. Audience participation, squirt guns (we brought sheets of newspaper with us to serve as umbrellas, along with everyone else in the theater).

I was more than a little nervous, but it didn’t last long. Such unbridled enthusiasm and joy, the costumes, the lip syncing, and dear lord, the drop dead gorgeous guys in their gold briefs and the guys in their corsets set my closeted heart aflutter.

We stayed in touch after they graduated. Bob was taking film classes at the community college. I can’t remember what Carol did after high school, but the three of us still hung out. By then I had several close theater friends. We had parties once or twice a month, taking turns being the host. One such party was scheduled at my friend Dwight’s house.

Instead of the usual sodas, snacks and chit chat, Dwight wanted to spice up this party. We decided to make it a bachelor party, complete with stag film. We cleared with everyone first–after all there were several girls in our group, including one who was a preacher’s kid. Once we had everyone’s buy-in, all that remained was getting the pornographic movie.

This was before the days of VCRs. If you wanted to watch X-rated movies at home, it was 8mm film or your imagination. None of us were old enough to go into an adult bookstore.

But Bob was. I roped him into our shenanigans. He drove me to one of the adult bookstores near the airport. I made it as far as the entrance when the clerk pointed, first to Bob and then to me. “You. In. You. Out.”

As I slunked out of the shop Bob cleared his throat. “Um, where’s the smut?”

“Aisle Take Your Pick” the clerk said. My back was to him so I couldn’t see the eye roll, but I heard it.

Ten minutes later Bob returned to the car with a small reel of film. He owned a movie projector and camera, all part of his classes at the college. We took the movie to his house and previewed it. I didn’t know “core” could be that hard. The guys would love it, but the girls...

“This is too much. I can’t let Debbie and Susan see this.”

“I can splice out parts of it,” Bob said. “Give them the sense of it without making their eyes explode.”

We ran the film through his splicing machine. At my direction he excised most of the boinking close-ups. At one point in the movie the randy couple is in the copy machine room at work, going at it. The door to the office opens and another comely secretary looked in. The camera cut to the rutting rabbits, and the rutting was laborious, imaginative, and graphic. After five minutes of demonstrating the Kama Sutra, the camera cut back to the secretary who giggled, and slowly closed the door, giving the love birds some privacy.

After we edited the film, the secretary opened the door, then immediately tittered and closed it again. All the sexual calisthenics were on the proverbial cutting room floor. We left enough sex in the movie to satisfy the guys (I hoped) without traumatizing the girls. In hindsight I don’t think they would have flinched had they saw the unedited version of the movie.

I borrowed Bob’s movie projector and took it to the party. We watched it three times. I had the movie in a lunch sack, since everyone knows that smut comes in plain brown packaging. After the third screening I took the discarded strips of film from the bag and passed them out to the guys. They held up the thin film to a lamp and got an idea of what they’d missed. They demanded I have Bob put the film back together again so they could see the “really good stuff.”

Bob moved to Ohio and we lost touch in those pre-internet days. With a third of our trio gone, Carol and I soon drifted apart as well.

Decades later I found both of them on Facebook. I sent them messages telling them how much the Okay Seniors meant to me, and how grateful I was for their friendship. Since I wasn’t one of their Facebook friends, I had no way of knowing if they ever received the message, but I assume not, as I got no reply.

Jump ahead to a month or so ago. I published a substack about my drama teacher, J.C. Ledford, and mentioned Bob in it. J.C. wanted to avoid confusion with two Bobs so she called me Robert for weeks. A friend in Oregon reads my substack. When he started that one he texted me before he finished it.

“You went to Fort Lauderdale High School? Do you know Bob Klaffky?”

It smacked me right in the gob. “Yes! I mention him in the stack. How do you know him?”

“I’ve done work for him before. In fact I’m going out to Ohio this week to do another job for him.” Norman gave Bob the link to the story, and the two of us reconnected. I can’t speak for him, but it was like no time had passed when we chatted. I asked about Carol and he told me she’d died a few years ago. I’m sorry I never got a chance to tell her how important she was to me. I didn’t mention it to Bob, either, as I didn’t want to sound like a Hallmark Card. He’ll find out when he reads this.

And just in case it’s not crystal clear: he and Carol were lifeboats to a lonely freshman lost at sea. I cannot imagine what my high school life would have been like, had it not been for these two seniors who ignored high school’s social norms, and welcomed me into their circle

Carol 2nd from left, me at the end.