Jane Elizabeth Crawford

I made notice one day while I lived on Grant Street in Costa Mesa of a cute freckled redhead, who walked by my house every day on the

way to school. She walked with a fairly fast gait and with her eyes focused on what was before her neither looking to the side…that could be because she knew some freaky boy her age lived there but I wasn’t sure. She always dressed well and wore nice ribbons and bows in her hair. She was pale skinned of course and her red hair was dark cut in a nice medium halo around her face. She lived across the street and down on the next block…she lived midway in that block as I did on mine.

It is my junior year and I was just learning to be a social being. I had a close circle of friends from the same street and I had never noticed her before, so I assumed she was new to the area. So, after screwing up my courage one day I waited by the living room window until I saw her coming up the street. I walked out to the street on my side opposite her and when we crossed Baker Street…the busy one in our area she had to come to my side so I began to talk to her as I walked with her to school. I found out she was Jane Crawford and a sophomore at my school. She was very soft-spoken but didn’t seem to mind my walking with her. Meaning so far she hadn’t run off screaming or shrieked for help! And I also liked that she had failed to break into a full sprint when she saw me coming in the first place. She had told me that she was eventually going to a college in Missouri called Grace College…a religious based school… I was hoping that she would change to OCC after we got to know each other better.

I was on the chain gang at the home football games …the guys who marked the ten yards a team had to go for a first down…the remnants of my lame high school football career….I had quit the team just a week before, and the coach asked me to help out… and she was in the drill team.

The drill team was pretty hot stuff at my school….especially for a sophomore to have made the team. They wore white gloves, and short boots (mid-calf) with a green dress with white and black trim. It was very tightly fitted to the body on the upper half and the lower was flared out to enhance the twirling movements in their formations. It was all very sexy in an innocent way. Jane wasn’t big at 5’5” and about 115 pounds, and she looked great in the outfit…cripes…any redhead would! I am sure every redhead at school tried out for drill team based on those uniforms. The tryouts for drill team were in the late spring of the previous school year and then you had to attend meetings all summer so when school started they were ready for game performances right away with a modicum of retraining. Many girls were not willing to put in the time and many girls were not good at formation drilling so the cut list was huge.

Well, after walking with her for a couple days I asked her out and she thought it would be OK to go to the away football games together. Those were great …the first one being at a game with Orange High School. We sat with our student section at the game and it was played at Chapman College since they had the best stadium in the area. We talked the whole time and talked in the car on the way up and back…we were hitting it off very well I thought. The game itself wasn’t too good. We lost 14-0. We won one game in my junior year and no games in my senior year…and the one game we won was 7-6 over Newport Harbor. At home games she wore her uniform and had to sit with the drill team and I only got to watch her at half time. I was down on the field while they performed their routines with the band. As she would often come by me in one of their formations she would always smile but could give no other sign of recognition. After the second away game and our second date I walked her to the door and we were talking and I made the huge mistake of asking her for a goodnight kiss. I mean alarms were going off so loud in my head after I asked her I knew, just knew…I had blown the whole deal! I almost passed out from the tension…after a half hour of stunned silence she replied. Well maybe it was few seconds but my life flashed before my eyes at least seven times and it wasn’t that great a life, before I heard her speak! She simply said “I’m sorry, Barry, but I never kiss until the third date”. My head was woozy and I am sure I must have been wobbling in her presence. Somehow I was able to make some small talk with her and then she went in. I amazingly stumbled the block home without falling down. I was in agony…what do I do now? She had stopped me short and now I felt if I asked her for a third date I would be only saying I was asking just to see if she would deign to kiss me afterwards. Rather than find out if she would go for that third date with the question hanging over our heads I simply never called her or spoke to her again. It is the Barry way of solving hard questions at the time. I would go to school early or late and I would check to see if she was walking to school at the same time and I always adjusted my departure based on if I saw her or not. That way she wouldn’t get embarrassed again and I wouldn’t get shot down again. I will also never know if she would ever have gone out.

The next school year was my senior year and about 10 months after the second date fiasco and the gods felt that I needed more pain and suffering.

We wound up in the same freaking class… Yearbook, it is a full year class so there would be no avoiding her or I would have to do another year of high school. I only said hello to her a couple of times. I was too mortified to ever be friendly with her. It was even a class where everyone spoke to everyone else since we were putting together the various sections of the yearbook. I was the sports writer and the staff artist. She was a page editor for the junior class.

Life is so weird sometimes.

So that was my first real dating experience… it makes you wonder why I continued at all. I did lower my standards after that so I dated anyone at all who was willing… she didn’t need red hair or to be on the drill team ; - ) and I dated people from other schools too. At least then if I got shot down I just never had to see them or their school ever again.