{"id":33205,"date":"2025-08-12T12:58:40","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T16:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=33205"},"modified":"2025-09-24T12:35:38","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T16:35:38","slug":"commended","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/12\/commended\/","title":{"rendered":"COMMENDED"},"content":{"rendered":"

 
\nThere was a Playboy bunny in my high school. A future <\/em>Playboy bunny. The bunny — now 75 —\u00a0 recently called my daughter in Chicago. The former bunny is a gardener and landscaping consultant. When she saw my daughter’s area code (Cleveland \/ 216), the former bunny said she had been a party animal in high school —\u00a0 Charles F. Brush High. My school. She said she didn’t know me.<\/p>\n

I was no party animal.<\/p>\n

The ex-bunny said she never paid for a drink until she was 30. My daughter said I had been a \u201cnerd.\u201d (Nerd<\/em> wasn’t even a word in 1968! We were called “dips,” short for dipshits.)<\/p>\n

After powwowing with my daughter, I got out my yearbook for the lowdown on the ex-bunny. The ex-bunny had been a blond Jewish majorette. Really?\u00a0 And I didn’t even recognize her pic. (Hey, it was a big school.)<\/p>\n

[Correction: she was no Jew. See postscript at bottom. The future bunny was just an above-average-intelligence, blond shikse. Boring!]<\/em><\/p>\n

Also, there was a page in the yearbook of National Merit semi-finalists and commended scholars. I wasn\u2019t on that page. The ex-bunny was. Whoa.<\/p>\n

My friend Hersky wasn’t on the National Merit page either, and he got a 789 on the math SAT (before the math SAT was recentered, in 1995, which jacked up many math scores). Hersky specialized in numbers and Cliff Notes. He never read a book — and still hasn’t. I read some books — short<\/em> ones, like The Time Machine<\/em> and Goodbye Mr. Chips<\/em>. (I started reading in college.)<\/p>\n

In high school, I hung out with many commended and meritorious people, but not the future bunny. She must have been dating. I liked hanging out with people smarting than me. My crowd devoured the Comparative Guide to American Colleges<\/em>, which we called the Bible. We learned about Reed, Pomona, and Rice. Rice’s freshman class had an incredibly high median math score. Emory was another good school. Swarthmore was harder to get into than Harvard.<\/p>\n

Northwestern . . . I flew student-standby to Evanston for an interview. At the Cleveland airport, the ticket agent asked if I was an attach\u00e9 because I didn\u2019t have any baggage. I didn\u2019t know what attache<\/em> meant.<\/p>\n

I expected some tough questions at Northwestern, maybe about the latest book I had read. I had read a book about Nazis — my favorite subject. The interviewer didn\u2019t ask me anything about books. Instead, he extolled the university’s six-year medical program. (I was pre-med, like everybody else.) Northwestern smelled like dead fish from Lake Michigan. I could hardly breathe. Northwestern was a playboy school.<\/p>\n

I flew to Johns Hopkins –a pre-med powerhouse. I talked about Nazis, and then the interviewer segued into mainstream material. He said Twain wrote Ethan Frome<\/em>. No way! He didn’t catch me. Hopkins was isolated and there was no social life.<\/p>\n

I’ll get back to the Playboy bunny eventually.\"\"<\/em><\/p>\n

The admissions interviewer at Washington U. said I\u2019d get in. Washington U. was easy to get into back then, just like Northwestern.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, back in Cleveland, at a cocktail party, my parents ran into a very savvy parent who said the best way to get into medical school was to attend a state school and get good grades. Go to Ohio State and get A\u2019s, which was better than C\u2019s at Harvard.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t going to no Ohio state school, folks!! Ohio State was open-admissions then and took everybody. I hadn’t memorized the Comparative Guide to American Colleges<\/em> to go to no Ohio state school.\u00a0 Not even Miami U. of Ohio. As a consolation, my parents said I could try for Michigan, Michigan State or Wisconsin.<\/p>\n

Michigan didn\u2019t do interviews. Not their thing. Too big.<\/p>\n

I got into Michigan early decision. The ex-bunny went to the University of Miami in Florida. More power to her, for getting out of Ohio. Maybe someday she and I will meet up and discuss how we didn\u2019t know each other.<\/p>\n

Charles F. Brush High was a big school. Six-hundred thirty-five kids. Yes, there were bigger graduating classes in Cleveland, but not many. And very few had bunnies-to-be.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Correction: <\/em>A Brush alum — who had been to the future bunny’s house back in the day — wrote me: “No Judaica around. Mother and sister were blond and Protestant. No accents. Lived in a goyish neighborhood.” Oops.<\/p>\n

I had presupposed the bunny was Jewish because of two things: when talking to my daughter, the bunny had mentioned a South Euclid Jewish neighborhood that she called “Chanukah Heights.”\u00a0 So I figured the ex-bunny was from there. But she wasn’t. Also, the ex-bunny’s\u00a0last name is vaguely Jewish — like Lewis, Brooks, or Cole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  There was a Playboy bunny in my high school. A future Playboy bunny. The bunny — now 75 —\u00a0 recently called my daughter in Chicago. The former bunny is a gardener and landscaping consultant. When she saw my daughter’s area code (Cleveland \/ 216), the former bunny said she had been a party animal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-of-age"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33205"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33499,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33205\/revisions\/33499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}