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In Minnesota, the number on your driver’s license is a function of your name and date of birth. A woman with the maiden name Linda Louise Eastman who marries James Paul McCartney and takes the name Linda Eastman McCartney sees her Minnesota driver’s license number change from E-235-522-549-898 to M-263-522-162-898 because her last and middle names change. Exactly how the name and number correspond is a closely guarded secret of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. However, Minnesota and Michigan code their numbers using the identical method—and Michigan doesn’t keep the method secret. The first character of a person’s Minnesota driver’s license number is the initial of the surname (E for Eastman). The next three characters of the license number are obtained by applying a complicated system called the Soundex code.

Here’s how Soundex works: Delete all Hs and Ws, and assign numbers 0 through 6 to the remaining letters as follows: A, E, I, O, U, Y=0; B, F, P, V=1; C, G, J, K, Q, S, X, Z=2; D, T=3; L=4; M, N=5; R=6. Convert the letters to numbers. If two or more adjacent digits are the same, omit all but the first. Next, unless the first letter was an H or W, delete the first digit. Then, delete all 0s. Retain only the first three digits among the remaining digits. If you have fewer than three digits left, add zeros. For example, for the surname McCartney we have the following numbers at successive stages of the process: 522063500; 5206350; 206350; 2635; 263.

The next two blocks of digits are determined from tables by using parts of the first and middle names. In most cases the code is determined by the first two characters such as Aa (028) for Aaron or Ji (414) for Jill. Exceptionally common names such as Joseph or Robert have their own special numbers (441 and 745). Finally, the last three digits are determined from tables using the day and month of birth. The numbers usually alternate in increments of 2 and 3. For example, the codes for March 1, 2 and 3 are 159, 162 and 164, respectively.

What is the advantage of this system? It’s an error-correcting scheme. It’s designed so that likely misspellings of a name nevertheless result in the correct coding of the name. For example, frequent misspellings of Erickson such as Ericksen or Ericsen yield the correct code for Erickson (E-625). Likewise, the code for Kristen and Kristin is the same (478) and the code for Emilie and Emily is the same (229). So, if a police officer wanted to know the license number for Kristin Emilie Erickson but entered Kristen Emily Ericsen in the computer, the correct number would come up. The Soundex code was developed by the U.S. Census Bureau back when they still conducted much of their business in verbal interviews, and didn’t apparently have the time to check their spelling.

On a recent Sunday at Knollwood Mall in Hopkins, a dozen or so baseball card dealers and traders huddled grimly behind folding tables as the occasional stray shopper passed by. A mere two or three years ago the weekend card shows were several times the size of this one, and prices were astronomical. Not anymore. How to cope with the newly diminished state of affairs? One seller at the Hopkins gathering, a surly balding man named Rick with a ridiculous haircut, actively trumped the customers disinterest with his own. In those rare moments when anyone asked to see the wares stacked in his locked display case, he only glared at them and demanded to know which card they were looking for. No listee, no lookee.

Thirty years ago, before the “serious” card collector’s market existed, only one company—Topps—was still making baseball cards. And because they were for kids and modestly priced, most of them wound up in the trash eventually. If you bought cards and saved them, you might possess something genuinely scarce. The modern collector’s market was born in the late 70s and early 80s as nostalgia-starved baby boomers started paying hefty prices for these talismans of their youth. By 1989, when a company called Upper Deck rolled out its first series, there was suddenly an unprecedented number of new or resurrected baseball card lines.

It was Upper Deck that almost single-handedly transformed the business, first with its glossy production values and later with its proliferation of specialized high-end card lines and marketing innovations such as autograph cards and memorabilia cards, the latter featuring embedded snippets of “game-used” this or that—jerseys, bats, caps, balls, bases, stadium seats; even, in one case, game-used dirt.

The advent of autograph and memorabilia cards changed the industry in a couple ways. It gave manufacturers a direct piece of the top-end collectors’ business, which previously had been an after-market that took years to ripen as cards aged and grew scarce. And it turned baseball card collecting into a species of gambling. These cards were seeded into packs at exceedingly low rates; Upper Deck’s first memorabilia cards typically appeared at rates of one in 2,500 or more packs.

As they exploded in popularity (and purported value—anywhere from $20 to over $1,000 apiece according to the monthly Beckett price guides), these specialty cards came to drive the industry. Predictably, the card companies rushed to give buyers more of what they wanted. By now it’s become common for the higher-end products to contain autographs and memorabilia at rates of one, two, three per box, even one per pack in premium lines. The trouble, of course, is that this glut has destroyed the cards’ book value. Meanwhile the manufacturers’ suggested retail prices have only kept climbing. As a result, it’s not at all unusual to pay $150-$200 per box for the chance to glean a card you would be lucky to get $30 or $40 for at a show. It’s a sucker’s bazaar. Lottery scratch games offer better odds.

And the suckers are catching on. Tim Smith has toiled in these vineyards of human abasement for seven years as the proprietor of the Sports Card Exchange in Robbinsdale. Nowadays, though, his retail shop accounts for barely a third of his income. The rest comes from card shows and Internet auctions. Smith pines for the days when card-collecting was not the near-exclusive province of aging, obsessive white men with too much money. “Ever since Pokémon,” he laments, “kids have abandoned sports cards and not looked back. And they really couldn’t afford most of the products if they did want them.”

It is a strange and dispiriting business, he admits. “It’s the only retail industry I know that’s dictated by price guides. They’re the ones who tell us every month what our product is worth.” He shakes his head. “And nobody believes them anyway.”

Monica Hammersten woke up at 3 a.m. one night recently. She smelled beef cooking. “And I think, ‘Oh, now what is that?’ So I come running downstairs. I had a bunch of hamburgers pattied out for the next day, and Jack had them all in a frying pan. He was standing there in his P.J.s just flipping them, as happy as can be.”

As his mother told this tale on him at home in St. Louis Park, lanky 10-year-old Jack paced the floor with a puckish smile and a sound-muffling headset over his ears. He’s autistic, and doesn’t like the disorganized sounds of his little brothers Elijah and Benjamin at play. But he likes Alice Cooper, and he loves to cook. While many autistic people are overstimulated by tactile sensation as well as sound, Jack delights in the pebbly texture and sound of couscous in a pot.

As a class, cooks are eccentrics, as documented by Anthony Bourdain. And even by autistic standards, Jack is no exception. Neighbors who have left their doors unlocked have found Jack undertaking his craft in their kitchens, his frontside dusted with flour. And his many night-time wanderings have taken him to McDonald’s, where his parents once found him standing next to the drive-through speaker repeating a favorite selection from his limited verbal output: “Burger, burger, burger, burger.” It’s an incident that keeps Tom and Monica Hammersten amused when they imagine it from the cashier’s point of view.

While it’s hard to guess at Jack’s point of view, it has dawned on Tom and Monica that his need for lifetime care will continue past their ability to provide it. Some autistic people learn to function in relative independence, but Jack’s tendency to wander and his experimental use of knives and toasters are likely to make him a danger to himself 24/7 for the foreseeable future. The Hammerstens estimate Jack has generated at least four calls to 911 since they moved to Minnesota eight years ago.

Parents who can handle that kind of stress naturally end up in the restaurant business. Behold, the birth of À La Mode at the Mall of America. Should the fickle gods of food service smile on Monica and her business partner, Marilee McGraw, their dessert shop may someday fund a group home custom–built for Jack and other autistic people. “I dream,” said Monica, “of fall afternoons in a warm kitchen with Jack and others like him cooking up their favorites for our big family dinners. This is the home I will build for Jack so that I can feel secure that when Tom and I are gone, Jack is going to have a great place to live.”

For now, this dream is tucked into a 790 square–foot wedge on South Avenue near the Mall of America’s food court, a spot once occupied by a hemp shop. À La Mode offers over-the-counter American desserts. It’s a modest mission: Monica and Mariliee want to offer a small menu of traditional items made well.

Very well. The apple crisp sampled by The Rake achieved the rare ideal of tender apples and crisp oatmeal. Under two scoops of cinnamon ice cream from the Edina Creamery, it was nearly impossible to unhand for a stab at the fudge-drizzled cheesecake. A chocolate chip cookie the size of a dinner plate met with unqualified approval from our five-year-old guest. Adults who insisted on sharing detected the signature of real butter. “I just found out from our Sysco rep that we use more butter than any other restaurant in the mall,” said Monica. A white-chocolate raspberry scone went into storage against leaner times.

First the rumbles raged in England between the Rockers and the Mods. Slick leather-clad Elvis wannabes dropped a few shillings in the jukebox, hopped on their BSA Goldstars, ran some scooters off the road, and popped back for a pint before the rockabilly faded. Rockers mocked the Mods’ more stylish—but less powerful—scooters calling them “Italian hairdryers.” The Mods sought their revenge on the beaches of Brighton—as immortalized in The Who’s Quadrophenia—and casually brushed the blood off their sharkskin suits.

Inevitably, the Mods couldn’t stay united. A schism developed, dividing them into two sects: the aficionados of the slightly less expensive, but more famous Vespa versus fans of the longer, more stable and stylish Lambretta. Some decked out their scooters with every mirror and light imaginable, while others souped up the engines and stripped off every unnecessary body part. By 1972 the Vespa won the popularity contest, and Lambretta’s factory in Milan was quietly decommissioned.

Now, the balkanization continues. Loyal Vespisti have drawn the battle lines once again, this time between the old and the new. The Vespa first came to this country in the 1950s. It arrived in force, too, via Sears department stores, where they were sold alongside the lawn mowers and washing machines. When Sears gave up the enterprise, a little scooter shop on University Avenue called Vesparado kept the spirit alive locally until about 1984, when the Vespa couldn’t meet tougher U.S. emission standards. The remaining scooters were nursed along by devoted mechanics and hobbyists working to keep these Italian marvels alive.

Vespas are now back in the U.S. with a sleek new design. The basic shape remains the same. (As original Vespa designer Corradino d’Ascanio said back in the 1950s, “The Vespa will always look like it does. Even when it is atomic-powered and riding on the moon.”) Already a phenomenon, the new Vespa has appeared in numerous TV ads, and was even featured on Good Morning America—although Diane Sawyer didn’t do much for scooterists’ inferiority complex when she hopped on a Vespa exclaiming, “We’re not Hell’s Angels, we’re Hell’s Dorks!” Even so, big stars such as Jay Leno, Sandra Bullock, and Robert DeNiro all have popped for a new Vespa.

The new scooters are sleek, modern versions of the classic without all the vibrations and front-brake dipping which made the original Vespa infamous. They tote an ultra-modern price tag, too—$2980 for a 50cc version and $3980 for the 150cc which is capable of pushing the needle past 60 mph.

“If you don’t care about quality or image, buy a plastic Yahama scooter. If you want to buy into the Vespa lifestyle, we’re the place,” said Jim D’Aquila, the co-owner of the new Vespa Boutique in downtown Minneapolis.

What’s that? Who said “boutique?” The unfortunate moniker does little to dispel the “Italian hairdryer” myth, but it does fit the new digs. Where else can you find Vespa watches, Vespa silver cufflinks, Vespa perfume, Vespa bath foams, Vespa herbal cream, Vespa bath oil, Vespa bath salts (in strawberry, mint, musk, and rose scents)?

Enrico Piaggio, the original head of the company that builds Vespas, told Time magazine in 1952, “The best way to fight Communism in this country is to give each worker a scooter, so he will have his own transportation, have something valuable of his own, and has a stake in the principle of private property.” Piaggio—clever capitalist! — wasn’t kidding. To open a new Vespa store, entrepreneurs reportedly need to plunk down a hefty chunk of change: $350,000.

Hardcore scooter enthusiasts, on the other hand, are still willing to get a little grease under their fingernails. Jeremy Liebig persists in repairing and refurbishing vintage Vespas at his Scooter Lab garage, and refused an offer to work for the new store. Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly’s scooter columnist Jeremy Wilker impugned the new Vespa campaign when he referred to it as “the Gap approach.” Fifty-one of these boutiques are to be opened around the country. Meanwhile, Minneapolis will get a second scooter shop in June. “Scooterville” will occupy an old warehouse near Dinkytown and it will specialize in Indian-made Vespas, called “Bajaj.” These scooters sport the older, classic style for the relatively retro price of $2000.

It may well be the summer of scooters in the Twin Cities. The Vespa Boutique owners are confident the new scooters will be a hit, but when I asked co-owner Garry Kieves for some details about the new Vespas, he demurred. “I can answer any questions you have on Ducatis and other Italian motorcycles,” he offered. How’s that? Have the Rockers won after all?

A recent statistic indicates that total beer consumption in the United States is around 33 gallons per person per year for everyone 18 years and older. But wait a minute: If the legal drinking age in every state is 21, why are kids as young as 18 included in the statistic? Apparently someone in a position of power has learned that people under the legal age are getting their hands on adult beverages. Here in the real world, that’s hardly news. But it does beg the converse question: Why do people under 21 have so much trouble buying non-alcoholic beer?

It is perfectly legal for anyone to consume, purchase, and possess a “near beer” (also called “non-alcoholic” beers by their manufacturers, “near beer” is the government’s preferred term). Near beers are not classified as alcoholic drinks, and therefore do not require the same restrictions.

In order for a beverage to qualify as “non-alcoholic,” it must contain less than one half of one percent alcohol by volume. Regular beer typically contains five percent. So do most cough syrups. A bottle of NyQuil contains 33 times the amount of alcohol in a serving of O’Doul’s. Cool Mint Listerine contains 72 times the alcohol. Nobody thinks to card teenagers attempting to buy mouthwash.

So why is it so hard for my friend Becky, a college freshman, to get her hands on some non-alcoholic beer? On a recent (attempted) bender, Cub Foods wouldn’t sell to her. Neither would Applebee’s. And she didn’t have much more luck with a host of other restaurants.

Part of the problem is local ordinances. Many cities set their own rules limiting the purchase of these “near beers” to people old enough to drink the real stuff. Even more commonly, many restaurants deny the drinks through their own policies and paranoia. When Becky and I raised questions about the rule, servers and owners tended to favor the reliable (but feeble) excuse that “it’s just company policy.” And that was the end of it. You can’t get blood or non-alcoholic beer from a stone.

According to Brian Kringen, who works for the Minnesota Department of Alcohol and Gambling Enforcement, restaurants don’t have any reason to worry. There are no punishments for “serving these drinks to anyone under 21, because they are legal to consume,” he said.

But minors can still get into trouble. If your daughter is under 21, and she gets pulled over after legally enjoying an O’Doul’s or two, she could theoretically lose her license until her 21st birthday. Thanks to Minnesota’s “Not a Drop” law, it’s illegal to have even a trace of alcohol in her system.

Though he knows of no cases like this, Kringen said, “It is possible that with probable cause an officer could run field sobriety tests and request urinalysis.” Peeing in a cup—that’s what it would take. Everyone knows it’s nearly impossible to get drunk off non-alcoholic beers—and your bladder will certainly stay busy. Since the miniscule amounts of alcohol in a “near beer” probably won’t register on a breathalyzer test, it would take blood or urine tests to show violation. A quart of mouthwash, on the other hand…

Tom Dunlap owns the coolest slingshot I’ve ever seen. It’s mounted on the end of an eight-foot pole, and he can aim the whole apparatus like a crossbow. Amazingly, this is a professional tool, one he uses when he climbs and prunes trees. He also uses it for recreation, as he did the other day when he took me tree climbing.

In addition to running his tree service company, Dunlap teaches climbing to professional arborists and recreational climbers, and he serves as adviser to the U of M Urban Forestry Club. He accompanied the club on a trip to Seattle last year to attend an international arborist conference, and to climb “superlative trees,” as he calls them. As student Sarah Folger recalled, the highlight of the trip was climbing a 200-foot old-growth Douglas fir in Seward Park on Lake Washington. “It was awesome,” she said. “We went with people who were really good climbers. You could even see Bill Gates’ house across the water.”

With The Rake in tow, Dunlap’s target was more modest: the canopy of a 65-foot American elm tree on the U of M’s St. Paul campus. He shot a small bag of lead shot through the upper branches and used its tether to thread a heavy climbing rope along the same route, eventually anchoring one end of the rope to the trunk.

Tom sent me up the free end using a technique adopted from spelunking; I used two handle-like devices called Mar Bars, one on my feet and one for my hands, to ratchet my way up the rope like an inchworm. I was quickly reminded that the sports I enjoy on the ground don’t require much strength in the biceps.

After taking a few breathers on the way up, I arrived at the lower branches about 25 feet up, and Tom quickly followed on another rope. In the midst of 30 mph gusts of spring wind, one difference between tree climbing and rock climbing quickly became apparent. Rocks don’t sway disconcertingly in the wind. The view from above was nice, but more appealing was the invisibility of the climber, even among the spring buds on a relatively bare tree. Students walking by were mostly oblivious as we spied on them from our living aerie. This climber noted how much of people’s lives are lived in a small zone between zero and seven feet off the ground. It was with some reluctance that we eventually lowered ourselves back into it.

June is the month when Twin Citizens get out and really enjoy their parks in staggering numbers—especially our chain of lakes. More than 5.5 million joggers, skaters, dogwalkers, cyclists, and ersatz nudists visit our city parks annually. That’s nearly twice as many visitors as Yellowstone National Park gets each year. We can thank our city founders for laying down the law. The lakes are public property, and should ever remain thus. In Minneapolis, private estates directly on the waterfront are an abomination. (The egalitarian tradeoff is that the park system was laid out so that there is greenspace within six blocks of every residential home.) Except for a shameless pocket of fiefdoms on the southeast shore of Cedar, every lake in the city is surrounded by uninterrupted parkland. Theodore Wirth was a champion of this noble vision.

In the big pavilion in the sky, superintendent Theo is undoubtedly fretting about the development on the western side of Twin Lake (known in the vernacular as the home of “Bare Ass Beach”) in the park bearing his name. The city of Golden Valley and a rogue’s gallery of profiteers have conspired to sell this prime greenspace to the highest bidders, who are dedicated to building—what else?—yet another outbreak of McMansions bejeweled with No Trespassing signs.

The Hidden Lakes development is not news. Five years ago, one lucky homeowner named Jean earned the distinction of occupying what is probably the first new house built on the shores of a Minneapolis lake for 100 years—her own private paradise. The elysian metaphors get lots of play in Hidden Lakes Development literature, which describes the peninsula between Sweeney and Twin lakes as “indeed, a private paradise. Imagine your own estate on this precious parcel dotted with majestic oaks and maple with sunset views to the west.” We can well imagine. That’s because, in point of fact, this is a public paradise, accessible to anyone with the courage to make the hike from the Minneapolis side, through the wildest stretches of Wirth park. The city of Golden Valley recently approved the peninsula for development of private homes (“starting at $1.5 million”) on this “precious parcel.”

Sharps like Barry Blomquist and Robert Schmid have cashed in on the parkland inheritance, having bought the 100-acre parcel fair and square. “So what?” say their critics. That their side of the lake is not in Minneapolis is no argument—it’s simply a testament to the fact that avarice, unlike love, recognizes borders. Less than a dozen homeowners easily trump a century-old ethic simply because the line between the enlightened and the benighted happens to bisect this beautiful lake.

It’s a done deal, so get your bids in now. But there is hope for the tree-huggers. Plans suggest that the new estates will be built on the Sweeney side, and the forested shores of Twin will escape the blade. Hidden Lakes owners will undoubtedly stake their claims on the west bank of Twin (indeed, they’re already trying to change the name from “Twin” to “Hidden”—which seems an exercise in counterproductive publicity), but they’ll have the unpleasant job of dealing with an intransigent population of park users who aren’t always burdened by normal expectations of “Minnesota Nice.” What’s worse, Minneapolis may require a 10-foot easement on the shoreline providing for public access (as they do on Cedar Lake, much to the chagrin of homeowners there who would prefer you didn’t know that). This may insure the expansion of “Bare Ass Beach” all the way around Twin Lake, into the backyards of Golden Valley. To paraphrase Hemingway, the moon also rises.

Here is Jim Carrey, telling you pretty much everything you need to know about Jim Carrey: “I just knew [from an early age] that I needed a lot of attention from a lot of people and I needed to prove to the world that I was magic. That was the underlying factor in everything. It’s the underlying reason why I do this.”

Don’t a lot of actors say things like this? They do. The difference is, Carrey means it. He really really means it. In a Hollywood where there is rarely very much at stake anymore besides money, Carrey’s quixotic quest for the best that Hollywood stardom has to offer is the most interesting high-wire act around—maybe even the only one around, at present.

His career as a topline star commenced in 1994 with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, an unusually apt vehicle in that Carrey was allowed to take what started as a fairly straight B-picture (think Jim Belushi and K-9) and turn it into a farce on the strength of his manic mugging and ad-libbing. Two things were immediately evident: He could do physical comedy like no one else in generations, and he’d stand on your throat to get your attention. But it was more than attention Carrey meant to command. He wanted love, adulation, respect—whatever you had. It’s hard to think of another male actor quite so needy. He’s practically an Y-chromosome version of Marilyn Monroe.

And Carrey was nothing if not likeable. His comedy contained nothing of its era’s defining cynicism, which was less a creative decision than a reflection of the fact that Jim Carrey is not wired to understand cynicism. Cynics stand outside. Carrey wanted in. His métier was not the smirk but the full-bore anarchic grin that only grew wider the harder he chomped on the scenery. There was no malice and no condescension in anything he did, just a gleeful sense of the untapped absurdities lurking in every scene.

But there was an undercurrent of menace, too, without which the rapid-fire gags would have worn out pretty quickly. If Carrey seemed a little like a stray dog that licks your hand and follows you home, you always half-expected this particular mutt to attack anyone who tried to leave the room while he was doing his tricks. Ben Stiller’s The Cable Guy (1996) is Carrey’s best performance, and his best movie, for exactly that reason. It was also his first box-office stiff. Nobody wanted a Carrey who wouldn’t go home, who held on to your ankle and gnawed until he drew real blood. Nobody wanted a comedy that played fast and loose with the kind of bottomless loneliness that turns its victims into dangerous people.

He followed The Cable Guy with two movies that represented much safer bets: the gloppy, wholesome Liar Liar (1997) and The Truman Show (1998), a concept movie of middling merits that posed considerably greater risks for director Peter Weir than for Carrey. It’s tempting to suppose that Carrey made them partly because he wanted no part of roles like The Cable Guy that put his rising star at risk, but it’s not so; the lead times of Hollywood productions being what they are, he was signed to both projects before The Cable Guy bombed. The path his career has followed is the one dictated from the start by his aspirations and the way he defines success. What a friend of mine lamented a couple of years back as the “Tom-Hanksification” of Carrey—the process of turning him into a latter-day Gary Cooper, a totem of idealism and uprightness—has been in the cards all along. And each step of the way it has involved discarding a little more of what Carrey does best in the pursuit of what he needs most.

I’ve always suspected that Carrey isn’t as interested in acting as he lets on. Yes, he takes pride in his craft, approaches it with diligence and usually intelligence, seems to enjoy the challenge of unraveling a character. That’s not the point. What I mean is that it’s all a means to an end—that he wants to be a star and an idol much more than he wants to be an artist. That’s a crucial difference. In the end Jim Carrey needs to mainline adulation. He has to be loved for being Jim Carrey, not for anything he manages to create as an artist (hence all the painful, compulsive confessionalism in his interviews). It leaves him little room to differentiate himself from the parts he plays (remember all the bizarre tales of his transmogrifying into Andy Kauffman on the set of Man on the Moon), or conversely to differentiate the parts he plays from the way he wishes to be seen. And he wishes to be seen as someone who never gives offense, is impossible not to like.

Which leads inevitably enough to Opie Howard’s shining, saccharine Grinch and the even greater depths of The Majestic, the execrable little post-WWII fable that’s being released to home video this month. They call it “Capra-esque,” but Capra never made anything this treacly. Carrey does everything but lick the camera to pull you nearer, but it’s a con. You know there are plenty of things he’s too afraid to show you. Even the Academy Award nominators, usually suckers for simpering flattery, were repelled this time. But no matter. “Carrey has never been better,” raved Roger Ebert. The show must go on.

Don’t bet that he’s through, though. He’s presently linked to three projects, and two of them sound like stinkers—a God-for-a-day comedy called Bruce Almighty; a social drama called Children of the Dust Bowl that’s sure to be Spielberg-ian in its middlebrow sentimentality; and a Howard Hughes biopic with Memento director Christopher Nolan. After that he would probably run for president if he could. But as a native-born Canadian he can’t, so he’s stuck in the movies. Once he’s Forrest-Gumped his way to an Oscar and sees how little it assuages in him, it’s hard telling what Carrey may do. He might even get interested in the work for its own sake.

The Majestic is available on DVD beginning June 17.

“Forget the stereotypes of sugar and spice. Girls are mean…,” begins Amazon.com’s plug for Rosalind Wiseman’s hot new book, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence, just one of a whole spate of books and articles about surviving the terrors of girlhood. Terrors so fierce that according to Rachel Simpson, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, at least one girl in every group interview she conducted for her book admitted to wishing she’d been born a boy, because boys can just fight and “get it over with.”

Girls, say girls themselves, are not only mean, but have an aspect of evil that is not in boys. Girls are sneaky, deceitful, unforgiving, and manipulative. They know how to target your weaknesses and they destroy you from the inside out.
When I look back on my own adolescence, I find I’d rather avert my gaze. After spending seven idyllic years in cozy elementary schools, I experienced Westwood Junior High as a hellish shock. All of us girls despised the way cool boys with their rough, groping hands cornered us between rows of colorful lockers, grabbing at our breasts, at our jeans. Although we were also confused enough to think this attention was flattery, and we hoped it meant the boy of the moment might be about to ask us to “go with him.” But no one is confused enough to be flattered when she is tipped off by fits and howls of laughter that the note she forged for herself to get out of swimming (“Please excuse Jeannine from swimming today because she has her period and she is not allowed to use tampons”) was dropped on the school bus, and found by the worst of the boys. And who really wants to remember the revolving door of belonging to the “right” group of girls? Or, perhaps most dreadful of all, the guilty horror of participating in the shunning of someone else?

The worst case I recall happened to a tall blonde, “Carla,” who was a peripheral member of our “popular” group of girls and boys, but never at the center of the clique. Somehow someone started the rumor that Carla enjoyed putting her curling iron into her vagina. To this day I can see the shape of Carla’s face, the startling blue of her eyes, the lankiness of her thin body in the tight designer jeans of the day. Her image was burned on my brain in the days following the rumor, as she shrank and folded in on herself right before our eyes. We watched silently as she withdrew from us, stopped coming to school, and then appeared briefly escorted by her parents for a meeting with the principal and school counselor. Within a couple of weeks she left Westwood and I never saw her again. I’m ashamed I couldn’t reach out to Carla when she tumbled into the sudden hell of a psychic stoning. I remember acutely what prevented me from rallying for her, and it was the same thing that kept everyone else’s mouth shut, too: the fear—and knowledge—that what happened to Carla was contagious, and that getting too close to the precipice of her personal hell was a sure way to fall in with her.

So I’m no Pollyanna when it comes to girlhood. But I disagree that girls are mean. I would say, rather, that adolescence can be a very mean time, particularly for children warehoused in large, anonymous factory schools with little parental involvement and no safety net. Perhaps it’s not girls who are cruel, but a culture that confines them in environments in which, as Joan Ryan put it in the San Francisco Chronicle last week, they “wander anonymously along a path of least resistance and low expectations,” without the benefit of a positive relationship with even one adult at the school.

As school size increases, so does student alienation, and more than a decade’s worth of studies suggest that students fare better in smaller schools. Mary Anne Raywid, one of the foremost researchers in the field, says the superiority of smaller schools over larger, more impersonal settings has been established “with a clarity and a confidence rare in the annals of education.” Minneapolis, with the help of a $3 million grant from the McKnight Foundation, is transforming seven large high schools into more than 30 “Small Learning Communities,” and St. Paul is exploring a similar restructuring.

This could be great news for girls—and boys. Because in addition to shining the light on the worst of what’s wrong with modern adolescent culture, we have an obligation to ask why this is so and what we can do about it.