Life in the Ville by Jimmy Del Ponte

I ended up graduating from college in 1977, even though I dropped the “College Course” at Somerville High School. You see, I flunked geometry, and when they put me back in the same teacher’s class the next year to suffer through it again, I freaked out. And it’s a shame because that Pythagorean Theorem would have come in real handy in my everyday life – NOT!

Anyway, I went to see my guidance counselor and he put together a special course/schedule just for me: “The Jimmy Course.” After all, I didn’t need college since I was going to be a rock star (you see how that worked out). Mr. Perno devised a custom course list that looked something like this: music theory, music appreciation, boys choir, a cappella choir, dramatic arts, and Dick Gordiniers’ Earth/Space Science. My senior year was a musical cakewalk – yet I still graduated by the skin of my teeth.

It was all Mrs. Carafotes and Andy Smith all the time – I spent almost as much time in the music room as I did in the principal’s office.

Now, let’s talk about those great musical concerts in the High School auditorium featuring The Boys’ Glee Club! When we filed in for rehearsals, they usually started like this – we would remove a few of those heavy wooden armrests off the seats and whip them around the auditorium. I can still remember the sound they made, crashing and bouncing off the wooden floors. We would rehearse songs like Greenfields and Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley – getting ready for a concert.

The night of the performance was always a riot. The audience was in place, the curtain was closed, and all of us clowns were on risers, fooling around. Then, right before the curtain opened, you would hear in a full, resounding adolescent voice, “Schaefer, is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one,” really loud! Andy Smith’s face would turn “that gorgeous red that spurs us ahead‚” and he would stomp his foot and scream for us to STOP!

What a bunch of nuts! If I remember correctly (and it was a long time ago), there was Joe Lutoff, Gary Winter, Paul Campbell, Emmet Smith, Howie Griffen, John Certusi, both Oppedisano brothers, and a host of others.

The Schaefer song wasn’t the only one in our repertoire. We did a nice job with When You Say Bud‚ the Flintstones theme, and B-A-Bay, B-E-Bee, the Three Stooges classic. What a blast we had! I remember we had an impromptu rehearsal during a fire drill to learn In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. We really had quite a nice little collection of tunes together.

The pizza in the cafeteria and the glee club concerts were some of the best memories I have of Somerville High. We joked and laughed our way through a lot of concerts whose audiences included parents, teachers, and politicians. But as I look back on our buffoonery, I do have some regrets – we never perfected the themes from Green Acres or F-Troop.