Finding My Badass Self

by Sherry Stanfa-Stanley

  Pause and reply, “Oh, already?” And then blow out a sigh before grinning.

  After two hours of agonized apprehension, discover the actual experience is over in a matter of minutes. The trip isn’t without an exhilarating thrill or two, and not quite as horrifying as you expected, mostly because the ride is so freaking fast.

  On your way out, stop at the front counter to pick up your pre-ride photo—the one of you suited up and perched in the car window. Your cocky expression in the photo doesn’t convey your panic about your impending ride or your anxiety about your tightly zipped jumpsuit bursting open as you climb out of the car. Who cares if photographs are deceiving when you look so freaking cool?

  Climb into your own vehicle, buckle your seatbelt, and proceed to pass several cars on the expressway en route to your suburban subdivision.

  Lean back in the driver’s seat of your minivan, in full confidence that you are officially a racing badass.

  Chapter 45:

  COMING FULL CIRCLE

  Being voted “Best Party Giver” wasn’t my only high school legacy. I also got my classmates’ nod for “Best Sense of Humor.” Oddly, neither of these academic accolades garnered me a single college scholarship.

  Thirty-five years later, when I received an unexpected email from my alma mater, I suspected I’d entered a parallel universe—the one where my former high school asked me to return to give the keynote speech at its spring academic awards banquet.

  They probably had me confused with another Sherry Stanfa from E.L. Bowsher High School in Toledo.

  No, it seemed the principal and vice principal both had read about my project in the Toledo Blade and thought my story might be inspirational to the students and their parents. I was bewildered and amused, but mostly I was honored.

  Until I remembered my fear of public speaking. Then I was mainly freaked.

  Sure, I had survived a radio show appearance, but that audience had been invisible. Speaking in person in front of a large crowd was far more intimidating, especially since this audience included some of the city’s brightest teenagers. Maybe, and it was a long shot, I might manage to mumble out a few words between my quivering lips. But, let’s be honest, how could I ever be an inspiration to these young overachievers when I’d never been more than a cautionary tale?

  My own high school academic career saw its highs and lows, as well as lots of ho-hum averages. I excelled in English and art. Not so much in science or math. Should I mention to these scholars that I flunked algebra? The jury was still out on whether that failure was due to my inability to master the curriculum or simply to my inability to show up for class. I topped my class in truancy.

  As the certified class clown, I also held the record for demerits in gym class. The dean of students and I were, affably enough, on a first-name basis.

  I had been what my mother, with her softening maternal spin, now called a spirited teenager. I wasn’t malicious and seldom overtly disrespectful; I just wanted to have fun. Apparently, some things in life never change.

  Given the awards banquet audience, it was probably best to withhold a bit of my sketchy high school past; yet I couldn’t be a poser. I chose to tell the truth, albeit with a few withheld details.

  I admitted I was mostly an average student and not always a rule-abiding one. Still, I told them, I felt I did make my mark by my involvement in high school activities, especially as the editor of the school newspaper. The paper, seemingly named in my unruly honor, was called The Rebellion.

  (Note: Bowsher originally capitalized on its location as the south-end high school within a Midwest city. Our nickname was the Rebels. We played “Dixie” at sporting events, and we waved the Confederate flag. Nothing political, racial, or unpatriotic was intended or even considered back then. Times have changed, and I learned those school rituals, however innocent, are long gone. Understandable, yet somehow disappointing to older alumni.)

  My heart sank further when I discovered the school paper, by any name, no longer existed. Public education must clearly take steps to meet the changing times. For budding writers, I feared this was a big step backward.

  The school newspaper wasn’t the coolest organization, I explained, but that hadn’t mattered to me. My involvement with the paper was the highlight of my high school academic career. Besides writing stories and eventually serving as editor, I also oversaw a section titled “Poetry Corner.” While most of my classmates knew me as an outgoing jokester, I possessed a quiet, introspective side. I wrote poetry.

  Unlike being an athlete or a cheerleader, baring one’s young soul as a poet is seldom a road to popularity. I told these teenagers that even as I realized this back then, I managed to push back the fear of being judged negatively. I not only wrote poems, in the safe confines of my teenage bedroom, but I even allowed my classmates to read them.

  Maybe I was a fairly confident nonconformist, or maybe I took this risk because I had discovered—by the time I was only eight—that writing was my thing. I realized how much writing and publishing both my own and other students’ poems and stories meant to me when our school-sanctioned Senior Skip Day rolled around my senior year.

  As my friends planned pool parties or trips to the mall, I went to school that day anyway; we had a publishing deadline. I’d been truant every other Senior Skip Day since my freshman year. As editor, getting the paper out on time was more important to me than enjoying a legal day off.

  This personal passion proved to be a major focus of my talk to these students. Like the cowboy Curly told Billy Crystal’s character in City Slickers (were any of these kids even old enough to know this movie?), the secret of life is “Just one thing. … You stick to that and the rest don’t mean sh*t.”

  I suggested that maybe we were all cowboys and that this one thing was what we all needed to figure out and hold on to. Maybe they didn’t yet know what that one thing was, but they would eventually find out. Perhaps it was success in a particular profession, raising a family, or something else they hoped would provide a sense of integrity and self-fulfillment. They needed to stick to that and follow their heart, even as they inevitably encountered disruptions, detours, and hurdles along the way.

  Had I done so in my own life? Did I have any regrets? I told these students I thought regrets generally served a purpose only if you could do something to change them. Besides, I believed most people had more regrets about what they hadn’t done than what they had done.

  With that in mind, I admitted I did have a couple misgivings about my high school and college years. I wished I’d worked harder in school, while still having much of the crazy fun I had enjoyed. I wondered where I’d be now if I’d pushed myself and taken more chances, even if it was hard work and the odds seemed stacked against me. How many books might I have written? How many more different and rewarding experiences might I have enjoyed—even if I failed at a few along the way?

  Perhaps, now, I was trying to make up for lost time on all accounts.

  You can do it all, I assured them. You can work hard, chase your dreams, and still enjoy all other aspects of your life, simultaneously. Just put yourselves out there and don’t be afraid to open any door even if you’re unsure what you might face when you do.

  For now, I advised them to not worry so much about how others may view them. Write poetry if you want, I said. Try out for a school play or the quiz bowl team, even if none of your friends have the same interests. Say “yes” when it’s the difficult but the right answer, and say “no” when you know you should.

  It’s often impossible to tell when teenagers are listening to you at all, let alone if anything you’ve said has struck a single chord. I’d had long discussions with my own children when I doubted they ever heard a word. Yet I was occasionally surprised months later when they repeated—and agreed with—exactly what I’d said.

  I had zoned out in enough speeches and meetings in my life to know some of these students spent the entirety of my talk memorizing chemical elements for th
e next day’s test or else texting on their phones. But when I finished and allowed fifteen minutes for questions, we actually ran out of time. A few students and parents came up to talk to me later. If my presentation impacted even one of them, I couldn’t ask for more.

  And, from a personal standpoint, I survived one of the challenges that had terrified me most. Public speaking would probably never be something I embraced. But this single experience led me to accept other speaking invitations, with an increasing level of confidence and a slightly less shaky voice.

  I hoped my closing words summed up what I had learned from my experiences so far and what I hoped these young people and their parents might walk away remembering:

  “I’ll soon be wrapping up The 52/52 Project. The past months have been a whirlwind of anxiety, excitement, and enlightenment. I’m not sure I’d change one minute because I know it’s changed me.

  “I’ve learned to never say never; I’ve learned to let more things slide off my shoulders; and I’ve learned we discover much more about ourselves and about others when our world is broader and our mind is open.

  “As I stand here tonight, I’m clearly not the girl I was way back at Bowsher High School. I’m not even the woman I was a year ago. At the age of fifty-two, although I’ve preserved many pieces of whom I was at fifty-one and even at sixteen, I have become someone entirely new. In some ways, I’ve come full circle.

  “I’ve learned it’s never too late to reinvent yourself.”

  Occasionally, I still think about those young people I met that night, those amazing yet sometimes faltering and unfulfilled teenagers with the promise of their whole lives ahead of them.

  I hope their paths are filled with much success and love and laughter.

  Oh, the places they will go.

  Chapter 46:

  MY BIG FAT GREEK PARTY

  Having nailed the stranger bash I hosted, I figured I still knew a thing or two about parties. Even so, I might be raising the bar a bit high this time, crashing a fraternity party.

  I had happened upon a fraternity party or two in my youth. Attending a frat party at age fifty-two qualified as a wholly new experience. This time around, I’d be drinking legally, unlikely to meet up with any of my college classmates, and not apt to hit on the cutest boy there, since I was nearly old enough to be his grandmother.

  Apparently, Son #2—a former member of this chapter—had ensured I wouldn’t be a complete party crasher. As we entered the frat house, I was surprised to face a check-in table with a list of invited guests. And my name was on it.

  “Wow, frat parties have changed a lot since my college days,” I whispered to him as we were approved and directed down the stairs. “Since when did these things become so official and formal?”

  He shrugged. “Just since this chapter finally got off a long probation.”

  Ahh. So, the Marquette chapter of Sigma Chi had been on “double-secret probation.” Maybe frat parties hadn’t changed much since the Animal House days after all. Strange, though, that Son #2 had never mentioned this imposed penalty while he’d been a student and active fraternity member.

  As awkward and out-of-place as I felt walking in, I immediately found myself swept into the middle of crazy fun. These Sigma Chi guys knew how to host a party. Want to throw a beach bash in chilly Milwaukee in April? Fill the basement with sand! (The ever-suffering freshman pledges had to shovel it out the basement windows the next day.) Want to make a random old lady feel at home? Ask the DJ to play “Shout!” and dance with that middle-aged stranger without even questioning why she’s there.

  Disclaimer: One young female guest did tap my shoulder as we were dancing and ask, “Who are you and why are you here?” I told her I was pledging the fraternity. She nodded and continued dancing, seeming totally OK with that.

  As an older and more seasoned party guest, I also knew a thing or two about the social etiquette of bringing a gift. In this case, instead of bringing a bottle of wine, I deposited a six-pack of beer upon the basement bar.

  Before I get charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors, I should note the guys at the entrance checked IDs and secured yellow wristbands on the legal drinkers. Sigma Chi could not afford another double-secret probation. Besides, given the stacks of cardboard cases behind the bar, they had plenty of better beer on hand. I doubted the chapter bartender would have to contend with anyone else begging for my Miller 64, once dubbed by my disgusted sister, Lori, as “pisswater.”

  With a beer in hand and keeping my pledge to not ride on my son’s former fraternity coat tails, I suggested the two of us split up. He put up no argument.

  Maneuvering through the wall-to-wall crowd was the first challenge. Thankfully, my recent bout of claustrophobia didn’t repeat itself. And as far as being more than twice the age of anyone else there? I fantasized this age discrepancy was hardly perceptible.

  Making conversation, however, proved far more difficult than I expected: since I couldn’t hear a word over the ear-piercing music. Perhaps I should have borrowed my mother’s hearing aids.

  Mid-conversation, I found myself trying to read lips and then simply nodding with a blank stare at my new friends, these college kids with their nearly virgin ears. Just wait, I thought, until decades of full-volume earbuds and concerts catch up with you. Who will be laughing then? Me, that’s who! Even if I can’t hear myself laugh.

  I desperately wanted to ask the DJ to turn down the volume. But if you want to prove ancient and decrepit in a crowd of college students, try complaining about the tunes.

  I sighed inaudibly to myself and headed across the basement for another bottle of pisswater. The bartender-for-a-night handed me a beer and then winked at me, producing an unmarked beige bottle from behind the bar.

  I squinted at the bottle of orangeish liquid. “What’s this?” I shouted.

  “Moonshine,” he shouted back.

  Moonshine? I winced. Sure, I feared the god-awful taste as well as the heady repercussion from this high-proof alcohol of undetermined origin. But mostly I was suspicious about drinking from a communal bottle. It was still flu season. I was leaving for Italy in a week. I was old and wary. Who knew where all those college-aged lips had been before they’d been puckered around the neck of that mysterious bottle?

  The barkeep reassured me only a select few guests had swigged from the bottle. A select few at a frat party. Was that not an oxymoron?

  But The 52/52 Project was about immersing myself in new experiences, even if they entailed a risk or two. I wiped the rim of the bottle, closed my eyes, and chugged. Huh. It wasn’t garbage. I took another swig, just to be certain.

  I was hardly surprised a few days later when I was hit by a horrendous upper respiratory infection. I left for Italy pumped full of antibiotics.

  Even so, I had no real regrets about the moonshine. I did somewhat regret the watered-down beer I drank that night, since it eventually required me to ask directions to the bathroom—a frat house bathroom. (I will pause now as you envision this.) And I also momentarily regretted wandering into a back room of the basement, a dark one with strobe lights and couples entwined together in each corner. Even the moonshine I swigged didn’t prepare me for those flashing images. An Animal House it might have been, but Dean Wormer’s wife I clearly was not.

  I figured this was a good time to take my talents to a local college bar, which Son #2 and I managed to close up. I prided myself on hanging with those youthful late-nighters, although I regretted that just a tad the next morning.

  Good decisions make great memories; bad decisions make great stories. My Big Fat Greek Party resulted in both.

  It was official: I was re-enrolling in college and pledging Sigma Chi. My fraternity pledge was pretty much guaranteed. As long as I agreed to join the freshmen in shoveling the beach party sand out the basement windows—and I borrowed my mother’s hearing aids.

  I’d bring my own bottle of moonshine.

  Chapter 47:

  A SEGWAY IN
TO CATASTROPHE

  When a newspaper reporter asked how I came up with the idea to undertake fifty-two new challenges, it dawned on me that the idea had been brewing subconsciously since my first trip to Italy. I spent half of that with my youngest son, who was serving a college assistantship in a small Italian town. The rest of the trip, I traveled the country alone.

  I had never been to Europe. With the exception of several visits to our northern neighbor, I had never been outside the United States. Besides the required customs stop at the Ambassador Bridge just an hour from home (“No, Officer, I am carrying no firearms or fresh fruit”), Canada hardly qualified as international travel.

  Solo-tripping through Italy had been both an organizational dream and nightmare for a self-professed obsessive planner. I plotted an itinerary. I scheduled flights. I booked rooms in Rome, Florence, Siena, and Venice. I researched cross-country train and bus transportation. (Here’s an interesting tidbit about traveling in Italy: The conductor seldom asks for your ticket or announces where that particular bus or train, on which you are already seated, is going. So you’d best be damn sure you’re on the right one.)

  Often without a tour guide or companion to set me on track when I second-guessed myself—which was always—I somehow managed to arrive at all my planned destinations and see most major sights. I ordered fabulous food and wine, and mingled with locals and other international tourists, without speaking more than a few words of Italian.

  I never did learn how to ask, in Italian, “Where is the bus station?” or “Where is the ladies room?” Those phrases would have proven advantageous. However, the only Italian I managed to master was “Un altro, per favore.” “Another one, please.”

  I came away from that trip discovering I was more independent, capable, and courageous than I ever imagined. We all are braver and more competent than we realize, if only we challenge ourselves. That newfound awareness was likely the true impetus for my year of new adventures. I wondered: What other intimidating experiences could I accomplish if I simply attempted them?