Option Seven

Don’t be fooled by the six so-called options for a revitalized Plymouth High School system, that were unveiled before a gathering of town officials this past week.
Though thousands have already been spent on blow-ups of aerial photographs, reprints of sewerage study statistics, and for hundreds of those cute little colored plastic report folders, the worst-kept secret in town is that -- waiting in the wings for the inevitable rejection of those first six options, is a stupendous, unique, and never before seen lucky seventh option that will finally put Plymouth back on the map – just in time for the Quadrennial Celebrations in 2020.
What is that lucky seventh?
Well, first, let’s look at just how bad the first six really are (wink wink, nod nod):
Option One calls for utilizing the catacombs beneath the old North High School for religious studies, and for allowing out of towners to pay to have their oppressed Episcopalians and Methodists attend as well. Then, with the fees paid by the out of towners, the town would build a new school above the catacombs, sealing in the out of towners until and unless they pay an additional fee.
Option One also calls for a third high school to be built, at Pine Hills, at their resident’s expense, and for their children only.
Option Two calls for the town to take the Pine Hills by eminent domain, convert their imitation town green into a school for the arts, connect Plymouth South High School’s septic system to the Pine Hill Affluent Effluent District, and let North High School continue to deteriorate until actually forced to take action by the State.
Option Three creates what is referred to as the Guantanamo-by-the-Bay School Zone, in which unnamed students in unknown numbers could be kept in open-air buildings and taught by masked military men posing as educators.
Option Four kicks the kids out of the South Intermediate School, converts it into a high school, takes the Waverly Oaks clubhouse, converts it into a high school, takes the Plymouth South High School and converts it into a high school, and takes the old North High School and turns into the official residence for the Lord Mayor of Plymouth.
Option Five has Plymouth declaring education optional, and converting all of the former high schools into minimum security prisons to house the expected rise in Congressional convicts.
Option Six is to save all of the money that would have been spent on new or rebuilt high schools and instead, use it to lobby the national government for the re-institution of the draft, thereby removing a major segment of the high school population and rendering moot the need for additional structures.
Option Seven?
Well, first let’s discuss the parameters under which the architectural design firm was operating.
While they had been given a great deal of latitude in coming up with their options, they were told that any design they proposed must meet three minimal criteria.
First, it must be inexpensive to build.
Second, it must be inexpensive to operate.
And third, it must require a very long construction phase, over a minimum of ten years, so that the town never had to ask the town’s people for an override.

High School at Sea!
The secret seventh option, and you heard it here first, is for the town to purchase the Queen Mary and have it refitted for academic purposes.
Plans are already underway to have the Queen Mary winter in the deep harbor adjacent to Cordage Park, thereby allowing town residents to tour the facilities.
Even in its present configuration, the entire student body –including the increases in school population expected over the next 50 years, can be housed and schooled within its decks.
Furthermore the entire high school population can be taken on an extended cruise from September to June, with the summer and vacation breaks utilized for paying customers. Imagine that, the entire high school population spirited away, like the children in the Pied Piper!
While in town, the ship will serve a major tourist attraction, taking day cruises to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and instantaneously increasing the town’s hotel space by hundreds of rooms whenever it is docked.
Inexpensive to build –only minor retrofitting required.
Inexpensive to operate: all costs offset by paying customers.
And not requiring an override vote.

“It’s a win-win situation,” one leading opponent of just about everything told this reporter on condition of anonymity. “No more fancy schools, no more grubby kids, plenty of parking spaces to go around!”

Afraid of the dark?

What is it about certain words?
No matter how much we abuse them, misuse them, or refuse to use them, somehow they still maintain their power.
You’d think in this age of endless hype, that we’d run out of things to say, or people willing to listen, or care.
Take New Orleans’s mayor Ray Nagin for example. He’s in a hot water just for saying New Orleans should be a ‘Chocolate City’.
Did anybody really misunderstand that?
Is there anyone who believes that New Orleans – the Big Easy, as they call it, could ever be the same without the unique culture that lies at its foundation?
Louis Armstrong wasn’t born in Anaheim, California. He didn’t grow up listening to the marching bands at Disneyland.
New Orleans, the city that we all imagine, has a flavor that we can all taste, even if we have never been there.
The flavor of New Orleans is so strong that it has seeped in the river, the Mississippi, and found its way upstream into every corner of America, into all of our lives.
We know the truth, but the words still scare us.

I had a different reaction than most, when I heard what the mayor said. I didn’t think he was saying anything unusual but, I thought, he was being a bit greedy.
New Orleans already has a great nickname – The Big Easy, they don’t need another.
And I thought, isn’t Washington D.C., the original ‘Chocolate City’?
When I was a young man, living just outside our nation’s capital, I first heard that term. It started, I believe, with a famous funk group of the time, who had an album entitled ‘Chocolate City, and its Vanilla Suburbs’.
That, I thought at the time, was telling it like it is. And that, I still feel, was a wonderful irony: just a few years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior, the capital of a racist nation was 90% black.
I’m still convinced most Americans aren’t aware of that. They think of the Capital in terms of the monuments and the government, not the half million or more blacks that live there.
D.C. is like that old movie, Lost Horizons: hidden in the center of the world, is a majority black southern city!
Chocolate City indeed.

Maybe what most Americans are reacting to, when they hear that term, is their own city, or town, or neighborhood.
If Washington D.C. is a chocolate city, what flavor is their own community?
Tutti Frutti, Rocky Road, Butter Pecan?
If there isn’t an obvious self-consciousness about race in America today, there still is a degree of subconscious guilt: so some words or phrases still make us wince.
On the other hand, a good nickname can do a lot for a town. A bad nickname will keep the tourists away, no matter what.
Take ‘America’s Home Town’, please!
No, that’s not fair. ‘America’s Home Town’ is a great slogan, for tourists headed here with their history books in hand.
But for everybody else, it doesn’t sound like much fun, does it?
And it certainly doesn’t have any ‘taste appeal’.

So we’ve come to the question, what flavor is Plymouth?
Vanilla is, of course, an obvious and perhaps controversial choice.
Plymouth would seem to quality for official vanilla status too, as according to the 2000 census we have only a very small minority population: less than 2% blacks, a hundred or so Native Americans, a few hundred Asians.
But it’s probably not accurate, to say Plymouth’s character is ‘vanilla’.
Is any American truly vanilla?
On job applications I have to put a check in the ‘Caucasian’ box, but as I do so I always long for a more detailed choice. After all, I am do-it-yourself ice cream Sunday kind of Caucasian, with a scoop each of Ireland and France, Romania and Russia, covered by syrup that is equal parts Catholic and Jew.
And my kids: well, just say that Tutti Frutti doesn’t begin to cover it.
So though Plymouth is statistically ‘white’, I’m sure the reality is far more ‘flavorful’.
Maybe Plymouth could be the ‘Chocolate Chip City’: you know, vanilla with freckles?
Or how about ‘Mint Chocolate Chip’, which you might say is Vanilla, with freckles, and an Hispanic brother-in-law?
Maybe we could claim to be the Howard Johnsons of America: you know, with 57 flavors.
Or are we perhaps a bit more bland - the Dunkin Donuts of America: a regular, with the blue stuff, to go.
I remember a decade or so ago, when Dunkin Donuts tried to change the coffee drinking habits of New Englander’s? Instead of their standard Cinnamon roast style, they were pushing a more robust, Seattle style of coffee.
They knew it would be tough.
They knew we would resist it.
So they came up with a special slogan, meant to address our fears.
“Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”.
Maybe the town’s slogan should be, “Don’t be Disappointed by the Rock.”
I don’t think anyone is really afraid of the idea of a Chocolate City.
It’s just the words that make us nervous.