My Graduation

Hanging nice and neat in my closet is a vermilion satin robe. It is not made of the soft satin you would have a set of pajamas made out of but of a tougher kind. It was the kind that snags on your fingernails when you run it through your fingers. Balancing on a nail above it is the matching mortarboard with a cherry red and dull gray tassel. Attached to the tassel is a cheap, fake gold, "'97." On the other side of my closet, my cherry red diploma cover sits neatly perched in front of my autographed blue toned Richard Marx vinyl album cover. They are my only connection to my high school graduation.

I graduated from high school on July 29, 1997. Had I had my way, I would have not gone to it. I felt like a huge humpback whale and I couldn't find a nice outfit to wear under my robe. My face looked like a Tombstone pepperoni pizza and all the makeup in the house would only cover my sisters' porcelain colored skin. It was blazing hot that day and it made me sick. I was depressed. I did attend it for my parents. They were so looking forward to seeing their oldest child graduate.

The Rainbow Graduation, as it is called in school, was my ceremony. I attended the summer school program for the Savannah-Chatham County School Board. My school was Jenkins High but my classmates that summer were from all over the Savannah area and neighboring counties. There were 250 graduating seniors total.

The ceremony was held in the Johnny Mercer Theater at the Savannah Civic Center. The theater always looks small to me when ever I watch a Marylin Youmans dance recital. That steaming evening, however, it looked as huge as football stadium. In a short time, I would be in the theater leaving high school once and for all.

Before the ceremony started, we were to line up by schools. Since everyone was wearing robes, people pretty much chose to hang out around others in the same colors. I sought the vermilion people. We huddled and talked about why we were here and how we wanted to get it over with quickly and painlessly as possible. I felt I was at a loser convention. We were a bunch of people that didn't attend the "real" graduation. We were people who couldn't follow through.

The ceremony started with a sea of rainbow robes entering the theater. Parents were cheering us into the theater. Camera flashes were going off in our eyes here and there. Once every student was in, we all sat down. The head of the summer school program, Mr. Frew, spoke briefly before handing the podium to a guest speaker, a science teacher from Beach High School. The gentleman from Beach was to be our only speaker since we had no salutatorian or valedictorian. The guest speaker spoke of his life as a teacher. His speech lasted about half an hour.

Once the guest speaker finished, it was time to walk the stage. The diplomas were handed out alphabetically, school by school. Students from my school walked over to the stage together as a school when the last student of the previous school was handed her diploma cover. Each student had to wait at the bottom of the stage until the student before us was handed a diploma cover. When the cover was handed to the previous student, we walked on the stage and waited by the stairs until each of our names were called. When it was my turn, I walked across the stage and shook hands with our principal while he would handed me my diploma covers. I then flipped my tassel as I walked of the stage.

Finally, after the last kid of the night received his diploma, Mr. Frew congratulated us once more. A few sentimental people threw their mortarboards in the air. Grumpy people had to dodge the pointy corners of the falling mortarboards. At that moment, our night ended.

Everyone fought to get out of the theater. After about ten minutes, I finally found my parents By then, the stuffy evening air had turned into a cool rain. We hurried to our van and left the parking lot. My graduation night was over.