Le Grand Fromage - our principal

We called him 'Cheese' because?
Originally uploaded by Brite Lights photos.

SOUTHWESTERN CENTRAL, Main Office - Only once did I find myself sitting in front of Cloise Swearingen, Mr. Swearingen, Van Swearingen's dad and, to many of us, 'Cheese.'

I suppose we called him Cheese as a short form of Big Cheese, and I do remember the one bit of French I learned from Mme. Vandeberg - Le Grand Fromage. So for awhile, we called him Fromage for short. (I also learned 'merde' from Phil Parks in that same French class, and Bill Taylor and I came up with 'mangez le oiseaux.' I don't think the oiseaux reference cut across cultural lines, but we were easily amused.)

But there I go with another digression.

The power Cheese had was awesome looking back at it. While we certainly did some arguably outside-the-rules stuff, the last place we wanted to end up was in his office. I stood there once for a transgression that I can't recall (Honest!) and he did such a great managerial thing. He let me stand there for a good minute (scribbling on a notepad like Jon Stewart at the start of The Daily Show) before he looked up at me. Then, he didn't speak for what seemed like forever.

By the time he did start lecturing me, I would have confessed to stealing the Lindbergh baby, detonating the Hindenburg, and maybe starting the Korean War.

But those were simpler times. When people did bad things in school, they frequently ended up like political enemies of the regimes in some Central American countries - they just disappeared. Can you imagine for even a nanosecond what the penalty would have been at SWCS had someone carried a gun into the high school?

I got detention for turning in term papers late, for Godsakes.

Recently I went to a high school here in Sacramento and had to walk through two sets of metal detectors and then get patted down by a young female security guard before I was allowed into the educational maelstrom that passes for high school in California. (Ok, she wasn't that young but still...)

And when I needed to head to the bathroom (aka Boy's Room), I found out they are locked about 95 percent of the time, guaranteeing that when the bathrooms are opened, they are jammed with exhuberant, overflowing teenagers who understandably are less-than patient about who gets to the can first.

The school principal (definitely a non-fromage, who hides in his office, rarely seen) told me that the students are out of control and the bathrooms are a constant problem: fights, drug deals, kids smoking pot.

I suggested that he try holding his bladder for three or four hours and then tell me if he wouldn't want a toke or two.

Say what you want about Cheese, but he kept the bathrooms open.