>Goody, Goody Two Shoes
>When I think of the terms “kiss ass,” “suck-up,” or “brown noser,” one name comes to mind: Sallie Holmes.
She was the girl with the platinum blond pageboy and the sickly sweet smile who sat in the front row of all my junior high classes. Sallie Holmes was an insatiable Teacher’s Pet. A hand raiser. A blackboard washer. A maker of A-pluses. She also was the bane of my existence.
“Why don’t you ever invite Sallie Holmes over?” my mom used to ask me like, every weekend. “Because I hate her,” I’d answer. She’d sigh and wonder where she went wrong. Somewhere deep inside, though, she knew she was just torturing herself. Sallie was the yang to my yin, the angel to my imp. While I was coming up with strategies on sinking the latest sub, Sallie was informing her that I was passing notes by rolling them up and stuffing them in the top of a ballpoint pen. Gah.
It wasn’t hard, then, to be sympathetic when one of my stepdaughters complained about a certain girl in her class named Amanda, whom she just couldn’t stand.
“She seems nice, though,” I said at first. “I mean, she’s on the Honor Society. She won first place in the art competition last year. She’s president of the Chorale. What’s not to like?”
“Ugh!” my stepdaughter moaned. “She’s really bossy, for one thing. She’s always telling everyone else what to do. She thinks she’s so great and so smart and she’ll say anything the teachers want to hear. It’s just… so annoying!” Immediately, images of Sallie Holmes popped into my head. The glint of her braces shone in my mind as if she had turned around in her desk and waved a perfect geography test score in my face only yesterday.
“I get it, I get it,” I said, feeling vaguely nauseated by the flashback. “I used to know someone just like that.”
And so I totally should have known what was coming when I ran into Amanda’s mother, Mimsy, while out running errands the other day.
“Howwasyoursummer,” I mumbled politely, sweating like a pig in the 90-degree parking lot outside the post office. Mimsy smiled patronizingly, cool as a cucumber in her unrumpled linen shift.
“Wonderful,” she cooed. “Amanda spent the summer in the International Studies Program at the Governor’s School, and we just found out she’s the winner of a $10,000 scholarship for an essay she wrote on computational physics. How about your girls? Did they do anything interesting?”
I thought quickly, but all I could recall was a whole lot of sleeping and a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon. At the last second, I remembered something about a weekend soccer event.
“Soccer,” I said with a fake smile. “They medalled in a major, major tournament.”
“Really?” she said. “What tournament was that?”
“It was the, uh, Presidential Scholars’ Soccer Tournament of Big-Time Champions,” I said quickly. “Division 3,” I added, hoping to add some credibility. She raised an eyebrow.
“Well, you’re keeping busy,” she said, changing the subject. “I see your column in the newspaper from time to time.”
“Yep,” I replied. “It’s there, all right.”
“But what I really want to know is which committee you’re on at the high school. Because I haven’t seen you around at all.”
“The what?” I said.
She laughed merrily. “You mean, you’re not chairing anything? And your oldest a Senior? How on earth did you get away with that? Why, I’m over there every day stuffing envelopes, coding library books… bordering bulletin boards….”
“Uh, well,” I said, trying to think up a snappy comeback but coming up empty. “Uh…” before I could say anything else, I melted into an embarrassing pool of perspiration and shame on the steaming asphalt. Mimsy looked down at the resulting puddle and smiled wickedly.
“Well, I must be going,” she said lightly. “I promised to bring the salad for the football team’s pre-game dinner!”
And as she floated away in a cloud of fresh-scrubbed goodness, I swear I could hear Sallie laughing somewhere. Because while rebels come and go, a brown noser is forever.
>LMAO…now I ask ya, Lindsay, what’s more fun: making salad for a high school football function, or sending Maripan over the edge with a scat expose?In your shoes, I’d opt for the latter (though your shoes would explode with my big honkin’ feet, but you’d get all new shoes and I digress).
>Ditto Skunkfeathers – LMAO.I was the guy just trying to get by in HS, Mom always wanted me to hang out with the achievers. After all, their fathers and my father worked as engineers for the same aerospace company and OF COURSE I was going to be an engineer or physicist or something brainy.barf. Just be yourself – we need more of you.
>I suspect women like that volunteer for everything under the sun because they’re convinced that if they didn’t they would not be invited to anything. In their heart they know the truth, everyone dislikes them.
>Also, brown nosers beget brown nosers. It’s a vicious, vicious cycle.
>Oh my gawsh. You are so funny. The best line of your post?”a brown noser is forever.”Still laughing…
>That lady is full of shit. She’s really jealous that you don’t have to make that dang salad. She doesn’t want to be doing all of that stuff. She probably doesn’t have anything else to do (like write an article for the paper) but sit at home and drink.
>When my son entered high school, I took it as a free pass not to help at school anymore. I put in my 9 years of bulletin boards and holiday parties so now I sit back and relax. And it feels good!
>I think the answer you were looking for when she asked why you weren’t chairing anything was “you know that column you mentioned, yeah well there are other columns… I’m singlehandedly taking over the literary world with my writing”That would have hopefully shut her up.
>Some women just think that brown nosing makes up for a severe lack of personality. Pity is doesn’tJust remember, everyone across the world wanted to know the name of the “Unknown Rebel” in Tiananmen Square, whereas I don’t think anyone cared who the lick arse driving the tank was. Just another dude, doing what he was told.
>First of all by high school my step daughter did NOT want me volunteering at her school. This woman’s kid probably hates her. Second, you can bet she doesn’t have smaller kids at home. And I agree with Melizzard-she volunteers so much because otherwise she would never be included. Plus she is not creative enough to have her own column, blog, etc. Smile and move on!
>Too, too funny. 🙂 I do have to mention, though…some of the other commenters mentioned that by high school they felt that they had volunteered “enough” or their kids didn’t want them volunteering. I’m a high school teacher, and I would KILL to have some parent volunteers come in now and then to involve themselves in their kids classes or afterschool activities. I know lots of us are so busy, it can’t always happen, but it would be awesome. And the kids, even if they say it would really suck, tend to be pretty proud as long as the parent doesn’t do anything *horribly* embarrassing during the class/activity. 🙂
>nothing ever changes, just the faces. it will always be high school, in one form or another!
>I always figured those are the people that take one for the team for all of us. I mean if we didn’t have obnoxious brown nosers, someone might expect us to make salad for the football team or stuff envelopes or whatever. We NEED these people.
>Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathons are severely underrated. ^_^
>Well, you can bet that Amanda never does anything wrong under her mother’s constant gaze. Can you imagine what it will be like when she goes away to college? That girl will either get pregnant or arrested by the end of freshman year.
>My life would not be possible without those over-achievers. I mean, then I’d HAVE to volunteer to moniter the lunch period and make copies and listen to seven year olds read sooooo slooooowly.In all seriousness, I don’t feel bad. I know my turn will come to do all that stuff when my littlest ones are in school. And hopefully, I’ll take the pressure off some poor mom with babies who can’t spend all her time at school. 🙂
>I do have a good excuse- I’m sure if I volunteered for one afternoon at the high school and brought Punky and Bruiser along with me, they’d beg me not to come back…But OMG, what showoffs some of these moms are when I run into them (and this kind of thing has been happening to me ever since I’ve had stepkids), bragging about all they do for the school and how much time they spend there. Now there are GREAT volunteer parents, too, but there’s always at least ONE who is a TOTAL Sallie-Holmes-twenty-five-years-later! I guess they can never get enough blackboard washing. It’s like a drug…
>And I wonder why Marta didn’t want to chat with you at the Y. You do like to use your interactions with acquaintances as fodder for your blog and columns, don’t you? ….
>Yep. It’s called a “personal blog” for a reason. I could try writing about someone else’s day-to-day life, but I just don’t think it would have the same kind of flair.
>Hmm personally I think you got the better deal! Leave her to stuff her envelopes I say, I’ve got much better things to do with my time.Cheers
>Ahh anonymous.. there is nothing better for a mid day pickup than a little glass of “hater-ade”.
>Lindsay, I’m impressed you still post this stuff as well known as your blog is in your local community.Especially because you don’t strike me as a *the names were changed to protect the innocent* kind of girl. 😉
>Oh I’m pretty good about hiding identities. I don’t write anything I wouldn’t want to be called out on if I met the person in public. I change what I have to to protect people’s privacy.Put it this way- I haven’t lost any friends over this blog, and I can think of only one acquaintance I’ve pissed off- and I barely knew her.
>Really? That’s impressive. Truly.Because reading it I feel like I’m GETTIN’ THE DIRT!
>all those brown nosers have autographed pictures of Eddie Haskell in the closet.They are mean, sneaky bastards, I know, my brother is one of those guys that every bodys mothers loved. But he is really just a hole!
>I hope she reads this. Except you know that those kind of people never realize that they’re the obnoxious ones. We’re evacuating New Orleans tomorrow, so Nashville here we come. Thanks for the suggestions on things to see. We probably won’t get to do too much (money conservation), but we’re going to try to enjoy our evacuation-vacation.
>LOL@MimsyPlease tell me that is really her name.
>So let me get this straight… she’s proud of the fact that the school has wrangled her dumb ass in to do all that work for free? Wow… how on earth did she ever get the idea that she was so good? My, my, my…
>Oh, I so wish you had told her to eff the eff off. Stepford bitch!
>truer words have never been spoken. boooo to brown nosers. I can spot them from a mile away. Even on the internet. haha.
>watch out anonymous. you might get blogged about for commenting on the blog…
>Can you image how empty her life is going to be once those kids leave home? She’s going to have to start drinking or something to fill the giant void in her life:-)
>I’m all for volunteering in preschool and throughout elementary school, but middle and high school volunteering is not for me. I think kids need the space to be who they want to be, not see their mom/dad lurking around every corner. I would imagine that parents who are frantic to volunteer at middle and high school want to watch out for their kids. But, really I think kids are reasonably safe in school…it is the after school hours that I worry about. So, my advice let your kids do their own thing during the day, but make sure you are home each afternoon/night to monitor their afterschool activities.
>I was bullied in elementary school. Not because I was nerdy or geeky or anything like that, I was bullied because my parents were divorced. Yes, I’m talking about the 70’s even. I promise you, if I ever lay eyes on the leader of that bullying pack, I might feel the need to poke her in the eyeball.And, on the opposite side of that, my two best buds from high school are people I communicate with quite often. It’s been 27 years….no really.And, I think I know a bunch of those mom’s who are over-doing it just a bit…and you know what…leader of the pack bully girl is probably one of them, ugh!
>Eddie Haskell- love it. I am a compulsive volunteer-er at school… buuut, if I’m going to spend MY TIME FOR FREE- I like to do things MY WAY and do not always play well with others, especially Art Lit Nazis who insist on micro-managing every detail of the frickin’ crayon rubbing we are doing in class, or PTAnals (Mommy needs coffee)who berate me for not turning in reports in spreadsheet form, I tend to skirt around those people and have a good time doing my thing and hope they don’t notice! I am what you call, “a rebel without applause”