as usual, i’m the last to know….apparently, the parent bloggers network is looking for tales from the school cafeteria. i couldn’t figure out why so many of my favorite bloggers were all in sync yesterday. yes, i am that slow. and illiterate, apparently. i have no qualms about being late to the party…

when i think about school cafeterias, there are two specific high schools that come to mind, and mine is not one of them.

Rydell High.

and East High.

where eating lunch is an experience (and a workout). the soundtrack of your life plays in the background and everyone gets up to sing and dance. jocks and brainiacs and outcasts and just about everyone joins together in song. there are no lunch ladies or bad food or lonely girls forced to eat their lunches in bathroom stalls.

my high school, in fact, was nothing like this. it was, well, if i’m being honest – boring. i sat with my friends. from day 1. we ogled over boys. we ate what the lunch man (there were no lunch ladies at ICJA…but he did wear an awesome hairnet) served. he spoke only one word of English. when you asked for your pasta, he said, “sauce?” (a word that still makes me giggle…and also makes me want to hurl when i remember that nasty sauce that tasted like kimmel, served over overcooked pasta. ew) we sat in the same spot every day – with my posse (yes, that is in fact what people called us in those days….’the posse’…a term we both hated and loved at the same time).

and then, as soon as the first of us got a licence (me) and a car (me again) we left the cafeteria and never looked back. lunches were spent at starbucks or dunkin donuts or Jeruslem Pizza or Tel Aviv Pizza (yes, all the pizza places in Chicago are named after cities in Israel…bizarre, i realize, but they had the best cheese fries in town…mmm…cheese fries).

i wonder, though, if life were actually like Rydell high or East High…what would we have bene singing? what would have been the soundtrack of my life? what would yours have been?