time warp Tuesday: ninety 3 to ninety 5!

We can probably all agree that I am better off without the 'stache, which I foolishly sported from 1993-2003.  The wife was too polite to ever say anything, but she...well.....do women like them?  I doubt it.

ANYWAY, had been poking through the old box and found these gems! Not told in order, but some intersecting stories here....

The wife still has this tee and wears it.  Heck, even I wear it!  This is her on our back porch in Chicago around 1993.


We taught at a boarding school in Massachusetts for 3 years.  24/7 with the offspring of the very rich!  Is it any wonder WE NEVER HAD KIDS?  Kidding...kidding ;)
Maybe not.  I mean, we knew better than most how hard raising kids is, right?
Our dog Jack here, seen as a puppy later in these pics, was born in the kitchen of one of the other faculty's apartments...which is a very prep school experience....he was an utterly sweet and wonderful dog, of course, and passed away a couple years ago just before his 13th birthday...there were ten puppies born that fall, and we kept in touch with some of those others...


Summer 1995, I was a dorm parent with 8 girls and another female faculty member upstairs with them...they were wonderful kids.  They were replaced in the fall by 8 nasty and horrible boys, just wretched, drug abusing juvenile delinquents!  REALLY!  One big bust was an especially dislikeable boy tossing his used bottle of mary jane tea out the window into the snow....where I was walking the dog.  His family had a LOT of influence (cash!) and he spent a term in rehab and returned to graduate....another bust was I caught 5 of the 8 drinking a jug of Absolut one afternoon...the headmaster didn't like some of those boys and they were kicked out.  One of the things you realize about prep schools is, at least 20 years ago, is a)  that there is a great education for the kids, the best but b)  very few of the kids want to be there*, many have to because of wealthy families who have divorced OR c) the kids are bad and messed up in their previous school--there is a lot of, um, er, TRANSFERS of kids from one school to another, because for the money kids can get a second chance...usually downward.  Our school was like 3 down on a scale of schools.  1 being the Grotons and Andovers, the very best prep schools with the smartest and most motivated kids ....kids from those schools kicked out might end up at our school...kids kicked out of ours had plenty of others down the line to choose from.... d)  there is a lot more secks and drugs and rock and roll in the prep school world than you might realize and e)* YES, overall, for most kids they are wonderful, they learn a lot, they go to a great college, but there is this whole unspoken part too, right?  many kids like prep school and love it, but........


When we taught there, as I said, we got Jack the puppy, also had Petey, Emily kitten and Sam cat.


Me. 'stache, Chicago '93...


1994 when we lived in Chicago, just before we moved to that school in Mass:  this is how we knew our neighborhood then and there and NOW too!  You walk your dog, you meet all these other wonderful people walking around every day!