OF COOL’S AND CUTE’S AND THE REST OF US

Puberty first sneered its cynical smirk at me early in seventh grade. That always-tortuous awakening came even more cruelly to me than to most. "Nerd" had not yet become the operative word in a coming-of-age world whose boundaries were defined by "cool" and "un-cool." I for one was hopelessly beleaguered by the yoke of un-coolness, but had not yet given in to it. I desperately fumbled and stumbled in my attempts to be numbered among the cool, oblivious that it had already been deemed unattainable to me by the social conventions of adolescence in middle-class Jewish Chicago, circa 1961.

In truth, I was every mother's dream. But I knew deep inside that I was, in fact, little more than a victim of my own ambivalence: My desperate yearning to be cool, and my even more compelling desire to please parents who expected their son to be obedient, neatly groomed, respectful of elders, academically superior, in a word, the very antithesis of cool.

The path to cool could not be paved with science fair victories, prize-winning essays on Americanism, sharing a bedroom with one's grandmother, a wardrobe determined by a mother's definition of good taste, a father's insistence that a crewcut was the only sensible utilization of a barber's services. No, this was match for Jerry Weiss's well-greased pompadour, or Eddie Jacobson's slack-jawed indifference to things academic, or Barry Levine's singularly cool talent for producing the most ill-timed, disruptive burps.

The ultimate payoff of coolness was entree to a circle of girls who were "cute." Elaine Newman and Marlene Huttner wanted me, but they were not cute. Lois Lanzbaum's mother Sadie would have signed the pre-nuptial contract for me on the spot, but Lois was not cute (although today I hear she is a Rebbetzin!). "Cute" were the girls whose club jackets designated them as "Coledas." They teased their hair, popped their gum, giggled, talked back to their mothers, and had already discovered that coquettish-ness could co-opt a boy's nascent sexual urges without violating the line that discerned between girls who were cute and girls who were “fast.”

Cool boys got cute girls. That did not, however, deter my fantasies, nor did it sober me to the truth that adolescence is most cruel when one who should know his place tries to intrude where he does not belong.

The synagogue youth group was having a dance, the first to which boys would invite girls. Let sobriety and wise parental advice be damned. Nothing would suffice for me but to ask a cute girl to be my date. Gullibly egged on by cool boys eager for a good laugh at Marc-the-lummox trying to penetrate their carefully drawn circle, I got up the bravado to call the lissome Shelly Appel. She wasn't, er, uh, sure. She would, er, uh, have to let me know. A millennium passed. Shelly did not call.

"I wouldn't waste my time on such a girl," my mother counseled.

Undaunted, I shifted my intentions to the prematurely voluptuous Eva Marmorstein. It was as if the precise script for rejecting the advances of an un-cool boy were part of the Coledas' secret rite on initiation. She too er-ed and uh-ed and never called back.

"What makes her so popular, anyway?" my mother attempted to soothe.

Time drew short. Among the cute, only the diminutive Robin Novick remained, I approached her in the schoolyard.

"Will you come with me to the dance tonight?"

“Er . . . Uh . . . “

"I tell you what: I'm going to Hebrew School this afternoon, but if you call my mom, she'll pick you up and we'll go to the dance right afterward."

I can still remember the outfit I wore to Hebrew School, knowing – with a textbook case of denial – that Robin would emerge from our new Rambler to dance with me happily ever after: My only cool sweater, a white v-neck, gray pants, white crew socks and dirty bucks.

The only part of the fantasy to come true was the Rambler. There had been no call, no picking up, no dropping off, no Robin, no dance.

I returned to my place not angry, but humiliated. The humiliation lingered like most pubescent dreams until it dissipated into deeper, more circumspect wisdom that I would never admit sounded conspicuously like the advice my mother would prudently dispense: The virtues of inner charm, the deceit of superficial beauty, the fleetingness of popularity, the preciousness of a good companion, the human qualities that truly endure.

So now, I find myself embracing the same virtues that loving parents encouraged upon me. They are the values that I, wiser for the years and the tears, have preached to my own children, who seem to me mercifully above the vaunted merits of cool and cute. I have, though, carefully avoided telling them that a little yet unsettled part of me would still trade all platitudes about inner beauty for it to be 1961 again and for me, even for a moment, to be cool.

Shelly, Eva, Robin, if by some unearthly chance you get to read this, I still have a pair of dirty bucks, and I'm still hanging by the phone waiting for you to tell me that you'll come to the dance. Linda would doubtlessly understand. If you call, I don't know whether I’d laugh or cry.