PERHAPS YOU'VE HEARD -- of course you have! Do you not live in America? -- about the humiliating incident involving people that you'd never heard of before broadcast on national TV. An unidentified junior at Sickles High School in Citrus Park, Florida, went on CNN with her mother, Jeannette, to demand that a yearbook photograph revealing that the girl is wearing no panties should be removed from the yearbook and replaced with another and, furthermore, all yearbooks distributed already should be confiscated so that all evidence of the the exisitence of the offending photograph can be destroyed. The CNN report showed a fuzzed over image of the photograph (above) thus ensuring that millions of strangers will witness her 15 minutes of Sharon Stone/Britney Spears infamy rather than merely hunderds of snickering high school kids.
What was she thinking? The mother that is. The cat, if you will, is out of the bag. Everyone of the 2,500 kids at Sickles High School has undoubtedly seen the photo since it's been the talk of the campus ever since the yearbooks were distributed last week. And the mother seeks to repress the embarrassing photograph already exposed by a limited print media source like a high school yearbook by going on a worldwide cable TV network that flashed her daughter's secret abound the globe. Very shrewed, Mom. The only more effective way to protect your daughter's reputation would have been to appeal directly to Jerry Springer. The girl, who said didn't wear underwear the day of the yearbook photo because she didn't want panty lines to show, sat next to her mom on a sofa during the CNN interview. She wore a pair of shorts and sat with one leg tucked underneath her bottom causing the other leg to open in an unladylike manner in front of the camera. After all this humiliation, she still doesn't get it.
When I was in high school the most titillating language on TV was when Barbara Billingsly turned to Hugh Beaumont and said disapprovingly, "Ward, you were awfully hard on the Beaver last night." In a world where teenagers are sexting nude photos of themselves on their cell phones or posting them on Facebook, it seems almost quaint to have the high school yearbook as the source of must-see risque photos, even as subtle as this one, which according to a spokeswoman for Sickles High School, looks like "a shadow." (Never again will I hear the phrase "the shadow of your smile" quite the same way.) Bottom line, the girl brought all this embarrassment on herself by not keeping her stupid legs closed in a posed photograph when only she could feel the breeze.
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