Jim Lobell sent me the URL for classmates.com and I went and checked it out. Sarah Umberger gave me the idea to embed the location of this site into my classmates.com bio (because who wants to pay 29 bucks?..that's almost 30 dollars!!) Unfortunately Classmates changed their format and that info is no longer accessible for free, but this web site is starting to show up in the big search engines, so that's good news.
Please send any and all BEHS literary contributions, email addresses, random thoughts, etc to : crimeboss AT gmail DOT com and I'll add them to this page. The reason I say crimeboss AT gmail DOT com is to foil SPAM software robots - in other words, you will have to read and type my email address by hand
This guy was really well-liked and a couple of weeks after he started he was shot to death. I think he might have been Latino.
Spurred on by Anne Middlebrook a few of us friends decided to go to Midnight Mass (Christmas Eve.) I want to say it was out Falls Rd somewhere but it's been way too long since I've been in Baltimore to know for sure. Locals will know. Big Catholic-looking thing out in whitey-land.
We were late - so when we came in everyone turned to look at our scraggly group. Mmmm, actually one thing Anne Middlebrook could never be called is "scraggly", so let me just speak for myself. I was there, and I was scraggly. Anne was most likely looking clean. As for everyone else perhaps they did use Dial, I can't say for sure after all this time. Probably not is my guess. Either way the seated congregation were looking at us young newcomers hard. Since this was a Catholic Church I can safely assume they weren't perving.
As there was no more seating available we were ushered to stand along a side wall - this wall was regularly interspersed with confessionals. At the time I was recovering from a broken foot and I was forced to move on crutches. I took my place near the wall, and decided to lean back against the wall to get some rest. I had the distance to the wall calculated correctly, the only problem was I was actually standing in front of a confessional and not the wall! The confessionals had an arched doorway with a hanging black curtain. With the crutches under my armpits there was a point of no return where it would be impossible to catch myself. So I fell back on my butt, the curtain flew up behind me and then swung down, leaving me inside the confessional in total darkness. To my friends outside it must have looked like I simply disappeared. I pulled myself together and as graciously as I could resumed my place outside but needless to say our group had a hard time keeping straight faces after that. On the bright side we certainly provided some great entertainment for the regular church-goers! And thank goodness I didn't crack my skull when I fell!