Topless Puppets
My high school French class was pretty straightforward, as these things go. We started every class with an exercise called "5 par jour" (five a day), a five-question warmup exercise. Then we'd go into dictée (dictation — listening to something en français and copying it down), a short lecture, or a worksheet. Sometimes we'd get to watch a recent-ish movie (in French with English subtitles, of course) and take "notes" as we recognized French words. And every month we had Food Day, where half the class brought in a dish from a French-speaking country. To me, this class was the perfect balance of fun — especially as much of my class stayed on for all three years of French that were offered at my school, so we got to experience it all together — and actually learning French.
Less remembered, I think, was the yearlong extra credit assignment: Current Events. Mainly offered as a quick way to raise, say, a C+ to a B-, we could find a recent article about France (or a French-speaking country), write a short summary, and bring both in for a point of extra credit. Or we could bring in, for example, 25 articles and summaries, since there was no stated limit. And because I was the type of high-achieving student who knew how to exploit a loophole when I saw one, on at least one occasion I brought in 25 summaries to cash in for 25 points of extra credit that I didn't need. My teacher, Ms. Simerly, would go through the articles, ensuring they were all sufficiently "current," then go, "Wow! Where did you find all of these?" and I'd playfully smirk and say that I had my ways.
If you ask a teacher to sign your yearbook, most of them will go straight to the page where their picture is and sign something short in the margin. Ms. Simerly, though, had a special feature in the staff section of my senior yearbook. In the decade or so she spent at my high school, she'd offered hints as to her past and current interests — she was fluent in French and Spanish; she had put down roots of ambiguous depth in Fresno, about three-and-a-half hours away; she enjoyed attending alien conferences (like, Martians and such). Sometimes we'd ask her to elaborate on one of those things she'd mentioned either to us or to another of her classes; that said, we didn't typically ask in a charitable way, as we were most definitely trying to stall her from moving on to the next item on l'ordre du jour.
Anyway, the profile in the yearbook offered a little more (full text below):
The Life of Carol Simerly
Q: How long have you been a teacher?
A: Off and on, for about 20 years.
Q: Why did you decide to work here in Sonoma?
A: I like the area, and because the students are great!
Q: What do you do when you're not at work?
A: I like to read, travel, and garden. You know, what most old people do.
Q: Where have you lived?
A: I've lived in London, Paris, Washington D.C., Madrid, Kuwait, Singapore, San Francisco, and Fresno.
Q: What were some of your previous jobs?
A: I was an auditor for the IRS, an usher at a topless puppet show (the puppets were topless!), and a professor at the University of Kuwait.
It was so quintessentially Simerly — the "you know, what most old people do"; the casual mention of being an usher at a topless puppet show in between two dream jobs; the shoutout to the students because she knew our antics were in good fun. I'm sure her students asked her to elaborate on these in the few weeks between when the yearbooks came out and when school let out for the summer.
The thing about current events is that they happen around you all the time, but unless you're on an extra-credit assignment to find something specific (or 25 somethings), you'll miss a lot of them. So when I decided to search for Ms. Simerly online last night after unearthing my yearbook from one of the boxes from my recent move, I was surprised to learn she had died... in 2018. Because why wouldn't the rest of her life be as mysterious and wink wink as the beginning? I felt a stab of shame for my 16-year-old self, bringing in 25 current event summaries and then missing her death by almost four years.
But the thing about living a life like Ms. Simerly's is that someone, somewhere, is happy to record it. Ms. Simerly received a master's degree in linguistics from Fresno State (apparently — this was among the first small drifts leading to an avalanche of new information I've learned about her in the last 24 hours), who in turn wrote her an incredibly comprehensive obituary, which you can read here.
Some personal highlights:
in Paris she worked as a tax consultant, while in Madrid she worked at a US Air Force base;
her University of Kuwait job was specifically teaching pre-med students English, and in Singapore she did the same but for high schoolers looking to take the TOEFL;
her IRS job included the perk of top-secret clearance;
she took classes at the Sorbonne after she retired from teaching;
she had an "impressive private collection" of Bedouin jewelry, hand-woven carpets, and prayer rugs;
she was a PROLIFIC ASTROLOGER WITH MANY LIFELONG CLIENTS (???!!!)
All of this (and more) is why, when I shared this news with a friend who also had Ms. Simerly in high school, I said, "Cannot believe she slummed it at SVHS [our high school] for so long." (I also inquired to the void as to which famous museum currently houses her collection of rugs and jewelry and such.) It's truly difficult not to feel like our normal California high school was the least impressive of all the places she had visited and lived. But she never once made us feel like that was the case — and I think she probably enjoyed when we requested she go on tangents to talk a little more about her life.
Anyway, Ms. Simerly did sign my yearbook right next to that now embarrassingly scant Q&A (no offense to those who worked on the yearbook, but Ms. Simerly's memoir would have been more prolific than the whole book). She wrote:
"Chère Christine, C'était un plaisir de t'avoir eu dans la classe de français! Bonne chance en tout! Mlle Simerly."
Or in English:
"Dear Christine, It was a pleasure to have had you in French class! Good luck with everything! Ms. Simerly."
Because even if we were the least exciting part of her life, she sure didn't show it. And being the overachieving student I was, I still tried to make my presence felt even after I had exhausted all three years of French the school offered. When she announced my senior year that she would be retiring at the end of the year, I planned her retirement party: a small gathering at a park on France Street, where current students and SVHS alumni bade her au revoir.
While I'm sad to learn Ms. Simerly is gone, I hope you understand how lucky I was to have her in my life — even if I did never get any further clarification about the alien conventions. (Or the topless puppets? I'm trying to make a good impression on my new ISP, but I think for her, I'll sully it a little to learn more about those.)