By BILLY MURPHY
Laugh Lines

I found the coolest website the other day — http://classmates.com. Inever, ever pay for anything on the web but this was the first time I entered my credit card (within a few numbers anyway) and forked over $25 to register. The site is for people to register by state and city where they went to school and to find former classmates who have also registered. A stalker's Xanadu, I'm sure.

My intentions are not quite that ambitious. Actually, I just want to reminisce about an era of my life that's moving farther and farther away. And what an era it was. Being a teenager in the '70s was none too groovy. Imagine the sexiness in having the life goal to look like Greg Brady or date someone as cool as Marcia.

My plaid bell bottoms were so wide at the bottom that when I walked down the hall of my high school they flapped together sounding like someone beating a carpet clean on the line. My wavy hair was so long that when I would blow it dry to straighten it, it turned out looking more like Dorothy Hamill than Bobby Sherman.

I guess I feel searching for old classmates will give me some idea of my identity of who I was back then. I hardly know who I am now, so to go to the root is always a good place to start.

Back in my high school years, I was hardly the popular person I would later in life narcissistically imagine myself to be. I did play football and baseball and was the typical class clown who grew to have the same note on every test paper: “Does not live up to potential.” My teachers always said one of two things to me. It was either, “Could you stop talking and pay attention,” or, “Billy, your Butterfinger is melting through your pants, again.”

As most kids back then were driving around in “muscle” cars listening to 8-tracks of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, I was riding with my lone friend, Jimmy Branton, in his skid truck. A skid truck is a converted dump truck that has tilting railroad irons on the chassis to ramp and winch up old cars. His dad owned a junk yard and after school we used to drive around and offer people $25 to remove old cars out of their yards. I tell this boring story to dispel any doubt that I was the biggest dweeb that ever had a Linda Rondstadt poster in his room.

I really didn't know who I would find logging onto classmates.com. It is hard for me to tell how many people from my youth would have computers and e-mail. I imagine, some are yet to get paved roads to their house. I can't judge, though: to others I am laughable because I don't have a cell phone.

The biggest surprise I found on the site was my younger sister had registered there. And here I was, thinking I was patriarch of the Internet in my family, yet she beat me to it. But should little sisters have the screen name, “2Hot4U”?

I contacted a few old classmates and got some e-mails back already and it has been fun. It has mostly just been a reminder that life goes on and like me they've moved past staying up all night and sleeping the day away. Okay, so I haven't moved past that, but it has been satisfying imagining others growing old like me. So just like then, we were all made one by polyester, today we can be made one by Grecian Formula.

[Visit Billy Murphy on the Internet at billymurphy.homepage.com]

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