I Was a Rebo

I was a Rebo. (ree-boe)

I cannot explain a Rebo to you, really. Alas, Rebos are now defunct. Rebos all had their lockers in (of all places) Rebo Hall. No one really knows the origin of the word "rebo," nor why some people insist it is spelled "rhebo," so don't ask. Anyone left on the planet who still knows no longer has enough teeth left in their head to tell us.

Rebo Hall was a short, side hall that dead-ended at the stage doors to the auditorium. There were all of two classrooms in Rebo, one of which was the English classroom of the theatre director.

Art and theatre geeks had lockers in Rebo, as did the occasional punk radio geek, band geek, darkroom geek, journalism geek, or geek-geek. Lockers in Rebo were not "assigned" by the office (well, they were, but if you found an assignee in "your" locker on the first day of school, they usually gladly left for a locker somewhere in the main hall where all the cool kids were). Lockers in Rebo were bequeathed by their previous tenants. There was a caste system (no pun intended) in the locker assignments as much as there was in the acting and tech sub-groups of Rebo.

My senior year, my crowning glory. I had locker 679. All a tech girl could ask for. Well, that and getting assigned as light board operator for the spring musical. Locker 679, in addition to having the 7 scratched out, was the locker closest to the stage door, in a row of exactly three lockers. Locker 679 had been handed down through the eighties and into the early nineties, from Shelly Kierman, before her from David Palmer, before David from Andy Walsh (not even my older sister, former tech geek, had reached 679), and Andy had inherited it from......insert angelic chorus......Susie Crowell. (production note: the supporting cast sighs dreamily, men in angelic lust, women in plain envy of her beauty and sweetness: "Susieee Crowelllllll......") The high point of my senior acting class--much of which, oddly, involved chopping vegetables--was when the theatre director was giving notes on a scene and he growled at me, "and get your damn hair out of your face, you look like Susie Crowell." I walked on air all day. I had been compared to Susie Crowell!

I still have dreams about high school, and in these dreams the locker combination has not changed, which is funny, because we each had our own locks--but in each dream, the success of the dream as dream vs. nightmare depends on whether or not I can get into this locker.

But regardless of how the dream turns out, in real life, I was a Rebo. The last of the Rebos, in fact. They tore the lockers out several years ago, as part of renovation. This summer they renovated the auditorium, and moved stage storage. Harry retired. Susie is married and living in Baton Rouge, but soccer players get nose-jobs and act in Oscar-winning films. Rebo Hall is dead.

Long live Rebo.