{"id":530,"date":"2011-07-10T19:53:40","date_gmt":"2011-07-10T19:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.net\/blog\/?p=530"},"modified":"2011-07-10T19:53:40","modified_gmt":"2011-07-10T19:53:40","slug":"last-one-picked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/last-one-picked\/","title":{"rendered":"Last One Picked"},"content":{"rendered":"

Girls\u2019 grade school sports in the pre Title 9 days of the late 1960s were a decidedly low key affair, and presumably were included in the curriculum on the basis of the \u201csound mind,
\nsound body\u201d principle.\u00a0 There was no such thing as traveling teams, no parental involvement and no aspirations for college scholarships, simply a bunch of kids playing field hockey in the fall, skating in the winter (just skating around for the pure exercise of it) and softball in the spring.\u00a0 However, beneath this benign surface there boiled all sorts of jockeying for identity and social stature.<\/p>\n

I think that our class grouped itself into several cliques: the boy crazy girls, the horse crazy
\ngirls, the sporty girls, the brainy girls and everybody else.\u00a0 Of these only the sporty girls could be self defined.\u00a0 The boy crazy girls were defined by the fact that boys pursued them, the horse crazy girls were defined by the fact that they had a horse, and the brainy girls were defined by the honor roll that was read and posted each quarter.\u00a0 Perhaps this is why divvying up teams was such a high stakes affair.<\/p>\n

These cliques were pretty much mutually exclusive.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that any of the boy crazy girls would be considered brainy, in part because academic achievement was not a big turn on for the boys.\u00a0 And the horse crazy girls, well they were just in their own world as they galloped across the field whinnying.\u00a0 Although I occasionally flirted with being brainy, my identity was pretty much based on sports,.\u00a0 Therefore it was a big honor when the sports
\nteacher selected me, along with my friend Kit Spaulding, to be captain of the softball team one afternoon.\u00a0 There in a row in front of us stood all our classmates squinting in the afternoon sun, wearing baggy green cotton shorts, and cute white button down shirts with Peter Pan collars, this being in an era before t-shirts were ever considered appropriate outerwear for girls.\u00a0 Some of my classmates were hopefully punching their fists into their mitts, some staring directly at me, some looking down and rubbing their shoes into the
\ndirt.<\/p>\n

At this instant, I felt the weight of responsibility that had been thrust upon me. Kit and I quickly made our selections, moving through the athletic, marginally capable, and then the
\ntotally inept.\u00a0 With horror, I realized that when there were only two left it would be my turn to make my selection.\u00a0 I felt like I was taking out a dull needle and stitching the scarlet letters \u201cLOP” onto a fragile adolescent psyche – \u201cLast One Picked,\u201d
\nthe eternal stigma of schoolyard shame.<\/p>\n

And there it was.\u00a0 Ty Winterbotham and Gale Runnells stood before me. Ty was relatively new to our school, and her almost translucent skin and thin frizzy hair made her an unfortunate target of casual adolescent cruelty.\u00a0 But the odd thing about Ty was
\nthat she was totally oblivious to our scorn, thought that the \u201ckick me\u201d sign pasted to her skirt was a laugh riot, and tolerated other meannesses with amazing good humor.\u00a0 She was the type of person who would not realize that being sent to play right field without a mitt
\nwas a form of damage control, rather than an affirmation of her fielding abilities.\u00a0 Ty would not understand the horror of being the last one picked.\u00a0 I did not know Gale Runnells particularly well, other than I seem to recall her nickname was Punnells.\u00a0 She was tall,\u00a0 clunky, totally unathletic and always seemed to have an unhappy look on her face.\u00a0 I had no idea what to do.\u00a0 Kit stood quietly next to me.\u00a0 Although the last one picked would be on her team, her hands would be clean and blameless.\u00a0 On an impulse, and perhaps in atonement for past sins, I picked Ty, who gratefully skipped over to my team, while Punnells trudged over to Kit\u2019s team.<\/p>\n

I have no recollection of the sad little game we probably played, but as we were filing back to the locker room to take our showers, Punnells came up to me and said, \u201cI didn\u2019t appreciate that you didn\u2019t pick me.\u00a0 I know that I am not good at softball, but my mother told me that there was an accident when I was born and my right arm is weak and that is why I cannot throw well.\u201d\u00a0 I was stunned.\u00a0 In the tight gossipy world we lived in, I felt sure that I would have known that Punnells had a birth mishap.\u00a0 For example, it was common knowledge who was adopted, whose parents were getting divorced and I had even overheard at the grocery store about a mother\u2019s affair with the golf pro.\u00a0\u00a0 I felt that I had been put into an impossible situation and it was utterly unfair to spring a disability on me
\nafter the fact.\u00a0 Even the meanest person would not make a disabled person the last one picked.<\/p>\n

I struggled with my guilt for years, until I ran into Punnells at some black tie event, where she had emerged as a stunning, slim, glamorous beauty, a real boy crazy girl at last.\u00a0 I began to think that Punnells was brilliant and had skillfully invented her \u201cdamaged at birth\u201d story to inflict maximum revenge.\u00a0Mission accomplished.<\/p>\n

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters, like stop, post, spot, etc.)\u00a0 The number of asterisks indicate the number of letters and one of the missing words will rhyme with either the preceding or following words, giving you a big hint.\u00a0 Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and context of the poem. Scroll down for answers.<\/em><\/h6>\n

The day * ***** up as\u00a0 captain, I thought it would be fun,<\/p>\n

Until I realized it meant that I had to cruelly single out someone.<\/p>\n

I would designate the last one picked, and certainly it couldn\u2019t be ******,<\/p>\n

That I would stigmatize, humiliate and likely destroy someone\u2019s precious pride.<\/p>\n

******, Ty and Gale stood before me, the last two left and I had to name a name,<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know why, but I picked Ty and poor Gale was never quite the same.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Answers:\u00a0 I ended, denied, indeed<\/p>\nFollow Liza Blue on: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>Share: \"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Girls\u2019 grade school sports in the pre Title 9 days of the late 1960s were a decidedly low key affair, and presumably were included in the curriculum on the basis of the \u201csound mind, sound body\u201d principle.\u00a0 There was no … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-i-did"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-8y","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":532,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions\/532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}