Behaving abnormally

Here's another extended snippet from my "growing up in the 60s" book. I'm a student at UCLA and it just turned 1969.

By now the “Generation Gap” had been trivialized to where ABC had a prime time game show with that theme. ABC also had THE MOD SQUAD, a group of hippie crime fighters.

1969 meant a new year, new quarter, and new language. Obviously I couldn’t make it through two more sessions of Hebrew. Even non-Jews got better grades. And no one said I had to take three quarters of the same language. So I switched to Italian.

I had heard it was easy. And it was… until the scandal broke out the second week.

Apparently several teachers’ assistants had been sleeping with female students and giving them A’s. Their justification that it was a romance language didn’t wash. The result: Outrage by the department with a vow to make Italian the hardest language in the history of academia. By week three I would have slept with the TA’s for even just a passing grade.

I also took “Abnormal Psychology”, which proved helpful years later in dealing with actors. One of the assignments was to do some inappropriate behavior in public and study everyone’s reaction. I went to the Corbin Bowl, a place that held so many wistful memories for me. Ann Jillian and I had had a couple of bowling dates there in the 8th grade. Don’t laugh. I got to see her with her shoes off.

My abnormal behavior was this: I’d step to the line, ready to roll, and then at the last second I would move laterally a few feet and bowl in the next person’s lane. At first they were very nice. The experiment ended after four times when they tried to wedge my head in the ball return.

One classmate chose to urinate on the front steps of the administration building. He said people just walked by as if it were normal. I always thought as a snapshot of campus life in the late 60s that was the perfect image.