It's a Hard-Knock Puberty

Leave it to America to make the bad news of imminent womanhood even worse. This is the story of my sex-ed video.

I was having a conversation the other day with some of my girlfriends. They both grew up in England, whereas I hail from the sub-par public schools of ye olde U S of A (though what those letters stand for, I couldn’t tell you. Just kidding.) Anyway, in the Unified Sections of AntiEngland, the video they decided to show us to break the news about our monthlies was set backstage of the Broadway musical Annie.

Man alive, girls, we might have to have a whole other blog on the subject of Annie.

I LOVED Annie, with a deep fiery passion in my not-yet-developed breast. My sister and I ran through 3 or 4 cassette tapes in about as many years, playing the soundtrack over and over until the tape literally fell apart. We would run around and around in circles to “Hard-Knock Life” like participants in some frenzied tribal spirit-killing ritual. I grafittied Annie on my bedroom wall with a burnt sienna Crayola Crayon (and denied it up, down, and sideways until my dad told me that if I was lying I’d be sent to prison for forgery.) And, to this day, I still nurse a little crush on Albert Finney.

So here was a video I could relate to. These girls were LIVING THE DREAM! Imagine being 10 years old and getting paid to run those frenzied circles…in front of an audience…in New York! Awesome. Until the sex-ed video introduced the concept of “The Line” to the poor, youthful audience in their collective last moments of childhood innocence.

The Line was, literally, just a line, painted on a backstage wall, against which the actresses playing the orphans – and, even worse, Annie herself – were measured once a month. And when, inevitably, the little girl hits her perfectly natural growth spurt just before the “breast development and appearance of hair in new places” phase of puberty and her head reaches The Line…she was out of Annie. No longer a lovable, singing, dancing street urchin. Rather, unemployed. At age 12.

Horrifying, right? What a dream crusher. Why would you ever reveal the existence of The Line to a roomful of 10-year-old girls? Even more perplexing, how could it possibly relate to this squirm-inducing chapter in our health textbook?

I still can't answer these questions, but I can try and explain the thought processes of this clearly written-by-committee educational video: The Line's Silver Lining, if you will. Once you hit The Line (and subsequent unemployment, depression, alcohol dependency and other symptoms of a general downward spiral) you’re not long for your first period. And then, You’re A Woman.

(Big, long pause for…applause? Cheering at our great fortune? A hand-holding circle of Kumbaya? More like a stunned, confused silence. Aaaand cut to: poorly animated diagram of fallopian tubes!)

For the record, though my parents DID fill my head with forgery-related paranoia, they neglected to fill me in on the whole menstration thing. Oh, I knew how babies were made (and more importantly, that “sex” wasn’t having a crush on someone at school, which I once mistakenly believed for four, glorious minutes as I told my hysterical parents that I had sex “just about every day at school” – turns out, you can go to jail for that, too.)

So now, not only am I grappling with the horrifying knowledge of The Line (did my softball team have A Line? How about my family?!) I’ve also finally learned the big secret of what’s in those pink cardboard boxes my mom brought home from the drug store every month. That’s America for you: present the best thing that could possibly happen to a young American girl, reveal its seedy underbelly, and then reveal the even seedier innerworkings of that underbelly.

The British sex-ed video? Some spectacular bacchanalia of light and sound with blockbuster production value and such stirring emotion that, by the end, you're not only happy to be alive, but positively gleeful at being a woman.

Well, mates, at least we've still got that Revolutionary War victory to hang over their heads.

Femme Fatality
Boom Chicago