At the end of my freshman year, I received a rather weird church calling for the next school year--to be the only sophomore on the seminary council. Because I was the youngest of the group, I got assigned to (a) clean up the seminary closets/library and (b) produce all of the two-and-a-half-minute church talks for kids to put into their seminary binders. Since my cousin Laura had held the sophomore representative job the year before, the seminary closets/library were in pristine condition. (She ran a tight ship!) That meant my only real concern was the church talks.
But here's the thing--plagiarizing church talks back then was not an easy job. The seminary teachers wanted me to find two or three different talks for every month because they didn't want two seminary students from the same ward to ever give the same talk in church. So I had to come up with 18-27 of these talks. That meant every month I had to type up at least two of these 1-2 page talks on an electric typewriter, make enough copies for everyone in the seminary program to have one, and then punch holes in them so everyone could put them into their 3-ring binder.
Again, this might sound easy now, but this was in the days before the photocopier became standard issue equipment for seminaries. I had to make all the copies on the purple-ink ditto machine. It was kind of like the ditto machine in the video below, only I think it was hand-cranked, not electric.
The only pleasurable thing about the whole process was the smell of the toner.
Mmmmmmmmm...ditto fluid!
It should be noted that at that time in my life I did NOT know how to type. This is one of the reasons that I talked Chris into blowing a third elective by taking a typing class with me during our sophomore year. (The other reason being the typing class had zero homework.) In the beginning, typing one of these church talks without making a mistake took me soooooooooooooooooooooooo long. And one false move with the toner cartidge would mean the purple copies would be too faded or too smudged to read. And the carbon copy that I had to surgically implant into the drum would sometimes get crinkled, which would make the text all skitty-wampus, so I had to put a new carbon copy on the drum if that happened. And after about 40 copies, the carbon copy would run out of whatever magic it had that made the things print out in purple text. Consequently, I had to put on new carbon copies at least three or four times before the whole process was finished for just one of the talks. Then I had to do it all again for the second talk (and a third, if I had it). Then I had to be damn careful with the hole punch, or the holes would be off and wouldn't fit into the binder, which meant I could only punch about five sheets of paper at once. I remember that because of all this work it took to make the talks, I was late one month during the first semester with all of the talks, and Petersen and Hellstern were not pleased one bit, and they let me know it.
But there was one thing about this seminary calling that made it all worthwhile. Once every week or so, I got to participate in a seminary council meeting that included a particularly pretty junior girl--Kim Hawes. I would always look forward to the times when she spoke, because I had implicit permission to stare right at her beautiful face and hair the entire time. I rarely spoke during these meetings, and only on rare occasions did I speak directly with Kim. But she was always super-nice to me, and would even laugh at a few of my jokes.
Kim was also part of the group of girls that pretty much ruled the typing class. As per the official High School Laws of Socialization, these junior girls never talked to sophomore boys, so they didn't pay much attention to Chris or me. There were only three boys in the entire class: Chris, me, and Richard Watson. Richard Watson would try to flirt with the girls because he was a junior too. But as underclassmen, Chris and I could not flirt with them. They were the Alpha females, and we were not even in the same sphere of existence as they were.
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| The typing class Alphas |
At the beginning of the typing class, Chris and I would do our practice exercises and compare who got the better scores. Chris always outdid me every time. But Man! I tried damn hard to beat him! After the first two weeks, we had our first timed typing test, which meant everyone in the class tried to type as many words as they could as fast as they could without making any mistakes--all on these electric typewriters that clicked and whirred and ka-chinged in a cacophony of office sounds. If you made a mistake, you didn't have time to correct it. The mistake would just count against your official final score of how many words per minute you could type.
After that test, all the Alpha females were comparing their scores with each other and making a big deal over who had the fastest typing speed. Chris and I also compared scores with each other. He beat me, of course. And neither one of us got super-fast typing speeds, but we did get faster scores than one of the Alphas. I don't know how they found this out, but when the Alphas discovered that the two sophomore boys beat one of them, they used that information to really tease the slow-typing Alpha. That's when Chris and I discovered that if we typed faster than these girls, they would pay attention to us.
This was a life-changing event. Chris and I tripled our efforts in class after that, not because we were in competition with each other now, but because we wanted those girls to pay more attention to us in class. On the next typing test, we blew away all the Alphas except for one or two, which startled the hell out of them all. They began to see us as the competition, and they began to pay attention to us in class on a daily basis to see how we were doing because they didn't want to be embarrassed by getting beat by us again. They were always checking on our assignment scores, which we readily shared with them, because you just don't refuse an Alpha anything. They completely ignored Richard Watson, as he took on the role of the slowest typer in the class.
[Sidebar--Richard was the guy that was going to ask Jennifer Palmer to our senior year Homecoming dance, so she made arrangements to get me to ask her out to it instead. I was only Richard repellant to her. I think I saw him a year or two after that dance (was it at the MTC?) and he mentioned that both of us had wanted to be Jennifer's boyfriend, but neither one of us had succeeded. Maybe one of us would have succeeded if we had just typed her some barely misspelled love notes.]
At the end of the semester, we had our final typing test, and the Alphas were out to crush us. When the teacher said "Go!" our fingers nearly flew right off our hands. Both Chris and I were super-focused but relaxed and confident--we were in the prime of our typing ability. After the test scores were calculated, I had scored 98 words per minute--good enough to beat almost all the Alphas. Chris got 105--top score in the class.
Because of our typing class performance, all the Alphas decided that it was okay to talk to us. And when Chris and I became juniors the next year, the Alphas would sometimes talk to us in the halls or in other classes we had with them. Of course, we weren't officially in the group of guys that they'd want to date. But we were acceptable enough to talk to.
During our junior year, I believe the Arimo Mafia (except for Sheldon) was also in the Virgin Lips Club (VLC). I made the mistake of complaining that I'd never been kissed to Chris's family once while they were driving by us one day by the Arimo park. Chris's grandmother said, "Come here, Daren. I want to tell you something." I got closer to the car and said, "What?" She said, "Come closer. I need to whisper it to you." It was kind of a weird request, but I could not refuse her anything, as I'd known her since I was three years old and had nothing but respect and love for the woman. I leaned through the car window to hear what she was going to whisper. She then grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me hard on the lips. Then she said, "Now stop your complaining!"
Thankfully, the VLC ruled that the kiss did not count as my first kiss, as it had been given by an older married woman and was not done voluntarily on my part. Also, the VLC ruled that any kisses I had to do as part of a role in a school play did not count either. The kiss had to be voluntary and consensual. Consequently, I remained a faithful member of the VLC until the very end of my junior year.
Of course, by that time, Ruth Christiansen had already tried to be my first kiss. She was giving a talk on chastity in Mutual one day and asked for a raise of hands of those who had never been kissed. When I raised my hand, she publicly scoffed at me and said, "Yeah. Right. We all know you've been kissed before." And I threw up the Scout sign and said, "Scouts Honor." She scoffed again, but my friends confirmed the fact that if I said "Scouts Honor," it was guaranteed that I was really telling the truth. And that was the end of that argument. After that, I could tell she had it out for me. She wanted to be my first kiss. And she tried really damn hard to do that by having Bishop Bellon ask me out to the Sadie Hawkins dance for her. And when the kiss didn't happen at the dance, when we returned to her house to watch Young Frankenstein as a group in her basement, she tried to sit next to me on the couch that was behind everyone else (and out of their field of view) so that she could plant one on me. But I got the hell off the couch and watched it sitting on a single chair that was several arms-lengths away from her (about one Metric). Kissing catastrophe averted!
However, I did finally loose my VLC membership at the end of my junior year right after the last performance of the year-end high school musical. There was this Kissing Bandit tradition at the end of the last performance that people would shmush lipstick all over their lips and run around kissing cast members on the check so that when they went out to greet their parents and friends, they'd have lipstick marks on their face. (Hilarious!) Everyone in the cast was in on the joke, and the behavior was not only tolerated by the cast and drama teacher, it was expected. Since I was in the drama class, had a minor role in the play, and was also one of the main backstage crew people, I designated myself as one of the Kissing Bandits for the evening. Once the curtain fell, I quickly planted a number of extra-lipsticky kisses on the cheeks of some members of the cast--so much so that my lipstick was pretty much gone.
That's when Kim Hawes walked by.
Before I proceed with the story, let me once again explain how pretty she was. She was a tall girl with a beautiful face and long curly blonde hair. She was a senior, which meant her body had all the right curves in the right places (see the picture below). Overall, she was as cute as any girl could be. In fact, she had recently won the Jr. Miss Idaho pageant. She was a bona fide beauty queen!
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| Pono Hussey's best day ever. |
But as I held her in my arms and looked down at her beautiful face, I realized that I had an opportunity here to do something much better than leave lipstick marks on her cheek. She could see in my eyes what I was thinking, and she said, "Ohhhh, no!" I said, "I'm sorry, Kim, but I will never have a chance like this ever again."
Then I kissed her right on the lips.
Now, I had been a trumpet player in the school band for five years at that point, so I had firm, muscular lips that knew how to pucker. And I used the full power of every one of those muscles as I tried to give her a respectable kiss--one that would impress her enough to avoid being ridiculed throughout the school for being a bad kisser. I locked lips with her for about five seconds, but to my disappointment, she really didn't respond. However, she didn't pull away either, and that meant I still had a chance to impress her.
With that small glimmer of hope, I took the kiss up another notch. Drawing upon every memory I had of all those old Hollywood kisses I'd ever seen on the KID Cash Call movie night, I doubled down on the kiss. Instead of giving up in shame, I poured all of my pent up teenage passion for every crush I'd ever had into that single kiss.
Then Kim performed what I believe was the greatest act of charity in all of human history. She began to kiss me back.
A jolt of electricity shot up and down my spine repeatedly, like my brain was caught in some kind of Tron pinball machine. My entire body tingled with wave after wave of goose bumps as she held me tightly and kissed me in a way that was far beyond any dream kiss I'd ever imagined. The whole experience began to overload the pleasure centers in my brain, and although I had my eyes closed, I actually began to see stars popping in and out of existence. The room started to spin, and my arms and legs felt like they were turning to jello. I then realized I was on the verge of passing out.
Because I didn't want the kiss to end by me dropping her on the floor and then fainting on top of her, I brought her up out of the dip, still kissing her on the way up. We then parted lips, and I looked at her in complete astonishment, barely able to stand up with the floor spinning around me. She gave me this movie-star look that said, "Now THAT'S how you're supposed to kiss a woman!"
What I wish had happened next was that either (a) I would have said something witty or romantic that would have made her want to kiss me some more or (b) she would have made a perfect Hollywood leading lady exit--the kind where the woman removes the cigarette from her mouth and blows out a stream of smoke with a playfully mischievous smile. But the ugly truth of it is that Brian Friedel butted in and gave her a quick Kissing Bandit smooch on the cheek while I stumbled toward the nearest chair.
Her kiss absolutely destroyed whatever part of my brain that made my legs walk. For the next five minutes I just sat it that chair thinking about how good her lips and body felt while all the other kissing bandits finished chasing everyone off the backstage area. Left alone behind the curtains, I had to sit there until my legs finally said, "Okay. You can walk now." I then stumbled into the backstage bathroom where I washed off all my makeup and splashed cold water on my head until I could think straight again. When I walked off the stage that night, I knew for sure that I had lost my membership in the VLC, but it had been totally worth it!
Several decades later, I saw Kim at a librarian conference at Weber State University. I'd been invited to talk about instructional technologies that librarians could use to teach library stuff. When I saw her in the crowd, I stopped my presentation on instructional technologies and told everyone there that I owed any success I'd had in my academic studies and professional life to Kim. She gave me this confused look like "What the hell are you talking about!" But then I related the whole typing speed story, to the audience's delight, and finished by saying the only reason I had succeeded at anything in my life is because I could type fast. And the only reason I could type fast is because of Kim and her friends paying attention to me in typing class. They all laughed pretty hard at the whole thing--well, as hard as librarians laugh, anyway.
After the presentation, she came up to me while laughing and gave me hug. Then I said, "I'm sure you don't remember this, but I have to thank you for what was the single greatest moment of all of high school." Without missing a beat, she smiled and said, "You mean the kiss?" I nodded my head vigorously and said, "Oh, yeah!" She laughed again at that. Then we talked a little about our work and families, and then I left the conference with sweet memories of that long-ago kiss going through my mind.
Ever since that backstage kiss, whenever I hear "Kiss On My List" by Hall and Oates, I think of Kim, and how even though I completely botched every attempt I had made at any kind of romantic relationship in high school, I had at least done one thing right--my official first kiss with Kim.
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