From second through eighth grades I went to an experimental montessori-esque (but not really) school where you were grouped in classes by abilities, not age or technical grade. So in eighth grade a few of my friends and I ended up taking classes like Journalism and Theater (TheaTAH) with high schoolers, because anyone in the upper grades could take electives together. Being in Journalism messed up our lunch period so that we had to lunch with the high schoolers who also took Journalism, instead of our fellow eighth-graders.

One day we were passing our lunchtime by watching this bitchy sophomore who had no use for us clean out her purse. She always wore full makeup and heavy navy eyeliner, plus she had her dark hair cut in a short shaggy do (kind of like what Monica Gellar's hair looked like on Friends when Phoebe thought she wanted Dudley Moore's hairdo). It was the late 80s, and she was in fashion for then. For some reason when I picture her now (and look at her photo in the yearbook), she still looks older to me then as a 16-year-old than my almost-30-year-old self looks now. I don't know if that's because of her makeup choices, or my intense dislike for her, but there it is.

Anyway, so she's cleaning out her purse, and she ends up with this little pile of pennies that had collected at the bottom. Then she gets up and theatrically dumps the pennies in the trash. I think she even said something like, "I hate pennies."

My friends and I stared at each other like, "WHAT?" It just seemed so wasteful to us. Plus, if I remember correctly my weekly income at the time was roughly $5 allowance and maybe a twenty or two from babysitting on the weekends, so even ten cents cents seemed like a nice amount of change.

We started talking about pennies and people's attitudes toward them, and by the end of lunch we had decided to conduct an experiment wherein we would see how many pennies the four of us could collect (legitimately--no cashing in dollar bills just for change) over a period of weeks. We emptied our pockets and discovered that as a start, we had seven pennies. Needing a place to store them, we taped them to a nearby wooden bulletin board (the sophomore had left the room to go touch up her makeup or something). We even pinned next to them a helpful paper label: PENNIES ------>

That night, each of us ransacked his or her house and parents' pockets, and the next day (and every day after) we added our new acquisitions to the board. Things proceeded like this for about a week, at which point we had probably a dollar or two of pennies taped up there.

Then the wrath of another sophomore struck. She was the "coolest" girl in school, our very own alternative Sarah Jessica Parker, who every day without fail wore pale, not quite Goth makeup base; smudged rings of dark eyeshadow; long, black fingernails; and her hair spiked sideways over her head and dyed shades of red and black. Rumor had it that her family was poor, and that she and her sister were on scholarships, which might explain why she took such umbrage at our penny-collecting.

Whatever the reason, one day at lunch she took it upon herself to write this nasty note on our PENNIES------> label, castigating us for taping pennies to the wall when there were people in the world with not enough to eat, and so on. We were slightly taken aback by her ire, by her lowering herself to spat with eighth-graders, and, most of all, by the fact that she was bestest buddies with the girl whose throwing-away of pennies had started the whole thing. But we were too cowed by her (and her scary hair and nails) to stand up to her hypocrisy. Looking back, we totally should have written our own addendum below hers saying either, "Preach to your penny-trashing friend, then" or "Don't you recognize performance art when you see it, poseur-bitch?"

But we didn't, and our Journalism teacher (finally--we pretty much ran around like uncontrolled savages the year before I left this school) stepped in and gently suggested it might be best if we took down our pennies. SO AS TO AVOID FUTURE STRIFE, we did, and kept our still-growing collection in a jar until the end of the year, when we presented it to the teacher with our fondest love.