A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [22]
They had met on Maxine’s first day at the school, in September 1957, at the welcoming assembly in the gym. In the Mercer Island pecking order, the popular boys tended to be star athletes. They dressed well, had ski boats, and were inclined not to speak up in class. The popular girls were good-looking and svelte, and wore pleated wool skirts and twinsets. Brains were not necessarily a liability. There was a group of smart and funny boys—self-styled intellectuals at odds, albeit ambivalently, with the dominant high school culture—who read books outside the curriculum and assumed that most athletes were morons. One of them, Bill Byers, went on to be voted most likely to succeed. Another, Chip Wall, was voted most talented. Stanley Ann’s friends were not easily pigeonholed, but they were more outsiders than insiders. They called her Stanley. On that day in 1957, she was sitting with a group of girls (seven of whom would still be eating dinner together monthly some fifty years later). They invited Maxine to join them—a gesture she told me might not have been unrelated to the fact that her older brother, Bill, was six-foot-nine and destined for basketball stardom. “Stanley had only been here a year before me, so she knew what it was like to be a new person at school,” Box remembered. “I think that’s one of the reasons that we got to know each other so quickly. I can remember Stanley laughing when she introduced herself and said her name was Stanley. And right then she said, ‘My father wanted a son.’”
Laughed how? I asked.
“Well, how you would laugh at yourself when you weren’t ashamed of anything,” she said.
Stanley Ann’s humor was quick, dry, and ironic. The future anthropologist was a participant-observer of the culture of the high school and of its denizens’ foibles. Her sense of humor, Chip Wall said, was in the spirit of Peter Sellers and The Goon Show. She found things funny that other people simply missed. She could be sarcastic and snide, and had a particular disdain for classmates piping the opinions of their parents. Iona Stenhouse, a classmate, described Stanley Ann’s sensibility as a “can-you-believe-this? perspective.” She was direct. “She would call our bluff, our intellectual pretense,” John Hunt said. “That’s the way she was—blunt.” She was young for her class—more mature intellectually than socially, more confident of her brains than of her appearance. She had what Steve McCord called a slightly regal bearing: Quiet and composed, she held her chin a half-notch higher than most. She wore the pleated or gored skirts and blouses that were de rigueur, but could resist the impulse to upgrade to high-status brands. “She would probably laugh at me and say, ‘Sixty dollars for a skirt?’” said Kathy Powell, who squandered her earnings from her weekend job at the Pancake Corral in Bellevue on Evan Picone skirts.