Memories of Alma College

TRUE STORY -

Back in '73 I was a niner at Riverside High in Windsor, Ont. The next year I was attending the private All-Girl school Alma College in St. Thomas. All it took was a padded bra, shaved legs, my old Beatles wig - and lots of encouragement from my best friends, Janet and Judy Dougherty.

J & J were already going to Alma. And like most girls away from home for the first time, they missed their friends.

"C'mon, Sonny!," they pleaded. "It'll be just like 'The Trouble With Angels'!" And that's about all it took. How could I resist? Ever since it came out in the summer of '66, 'The Trouble With Angels' was our favorite movie. Any film starring Hayley Mills was alright with me. She played Mary Clancey, a teenage rebel sent to the strict Catholic, St. Francis Academy for Girls.

Anyway, Hayley and her best friend, Rachel get into all sorts of trouble whenever Hayley comes up with yet another of her "scathingly brilliant ideas." Much to the chagrin of Reverend Mother (a.k.a. Mother Superior,) played by the always wonderful Rosalind Russell - who caustically refers to Mary and Rachel as "the Devil's Agents." The movie itself, is like one of those live-action Disney films - and surprisingly enough was directed by film-noir sex-bomb Ida Lupino - who knew?

And that's how I ended up in an All Girls school for a year. Now discerning readers might remember that Sonny is an openly hetrosexual male of long good-standing. You may be wondering, just how could he pull this off?

Well, I hate to disappoint anyone but the simple fact is that if you pay all your tuition up front, no one cares. I could have been a go-rilla and as long as I was wearing a school uniform of pleated skirt and matching vest over a white blouse, no one in the administration would have batted an eye.

Besides, I've always had a slender figure with some might say, almost 'girlish' hips and that along with my boyish good looks and impish grin and my newly-acquired skills at applying make-up made everything go swimmingly. Except for once a week in 'Pool' class. I always had to sit out because it was "my time of the month."

That's how I became 'Alma Drysdale' - a forgeign exchange student from Beverly Hills. And just like in the movie, boy did we get into trouble. Smoking in the washroom, late-night dips in the swimming pool, sneaking into St. Thomas for roller-skating, swiping some of the communal wine over Christmas holidays. I tell you, it was nothing but ten months straight of hijinks and shitnanigans.

But that summer, my beard finally came in, my voice changed and that was the end of all that.

But the experience had been so much fun that years later I wrote a screenplay about it all and sent it off to Hollywood. After all, this story had 'Scott Baio' written all over it. Well, to make a long story short, Scott was locked into his contract for 'Charles in Charge' and couldn't get out of it. Then the script-doctors got ahold of it and changed things so much that even Willy Ames and Ralph Macchio turned it down.

But it eventually did make it onto the big screen. As a 1998 Disney movie called 'Mr. Headmistress,' - starring the always adequately goofy Harland Williams, then fresh off his comic triumph in 'RocketMan,' possibly the most under-rated family comedy of the '90s.

It was changed completely from my original script. In the new version, it was the school principal who dressed in drag just to spend time with a bunch of teenaged girls.

But, I must say that I got a fair bit of satisfaction from the fact that it was filmed - at Alma College. My ol' alma matter.

... As everyone in the tri-state area now knows, Alma College burned down yesterday. A week after the Ontario Municipal Board gave its approval for the new owners to demolish the entire 131-year-old building so they could put up condominiums.

Fire officials are calling the cause of the blaze "suspicious." Which is a joke. EVERYONE knew the inevitable fate of that building. That fire was a surprise to absolutely no one. Apparently 'someone' didn't want to wait for heritage groups to file an appeal to the OMB ruling. The only suspicious thing about the end of Alma College would be if a fire didn't happen.

That's how we deal with heritage properties in this area. Either that or the always popular demolition-by-neglect - Locust Mount and Talbot Inn being the most recent examples.