Vicki

I was in a class the other day and one of the women there caught my attention for a reason I couldn't quite put my finger on for at least half the day. Then it dawned on me: she looked and sounded just like this girl who was a senior when the boys and I were sophomores. All of us had a grinding crush on her.

It didn't help that we were all cast in a play where she played a cat. Her costume was just a criminally tight leotard with tail, cat ears, painted whiskers, and long nails painted black. Oh, and she crawled around on all fours the whole time. I recall us all literally vibrating with erotic tension as we stood in glare of stage lights, trying to fight obvious boners as she slunk around our legs. Thank God this was the late 70s and tight, tiny briefs were the fashion of the day; they usually held the bad boy at bay wonderfully.

TLD:My clique did all the plays in high school. We thought it was too good to be true that we got to hang with the girls and even got to kiss some of them on stage - particularly the ones who'd never kiss us on purpose in real life. I tried to continue giving my spare time to the theatre in college, but I got really really tired of being one of the only two or three straight guys in a sea of gay guys. Besides, there were pseudo-intellectual discussions to be had in dark smoky bars, mostly about girls. I've always thought my dismay at the difference between high school productions and those thereafter must be something akin to high school wrestlers realizing the only path into adulthood with that activity will lead you to dramatically jumping off the turnbuckle and hitting follow steroid abusers with metal folding chairs.

When I put together that this woman in the class was the doppelganger for the primary object of our collective lust back in the day, I was slapped by cognitive dissonance of realizing I actually found her somewhat unattractive, and certainly someone I would never date were I single now.

It brought to mind a rolling conversation my wife and I have been having lately, about how beautiful young people are - even the ugly ones - and they just have no idea. This is not meant in the prurient sense, but in the sense of admiring true beauty. The glow that surrounds the kids from about 15 to 25 is perhaps something only people my age truly see, but it is amazing. The infamous and glorious article by Mary Schmich (attributed to Kurt Vonnegut on the web originally) "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young" is largely about this phenomenon, particularly the line "Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth."

And, it probably had a lot to do with why we found that girl way back then so damn sexy.

And why I probably wouldn't now (regardless of what age she was when I encountered her).