El Dorado!

When I was eight and my sister was almost four, our parents enrolled us in Eldorado School for the Gifted. Set back on a smallish lot on a quiet section of Walnut Street in Orange, Eldorado’s ordinary appearance belied the strange goings-on within.

Eldorado School had been founded decades earlier by an eccentric psychiatrist, Dr Glory Ludwick, who ran the school in a very hands-on manner with the help of her two grown ne’er do well sons and their wives. “Physician, heal thyself” would have probably been pretty apt advice for Dr Ludwick, who paraded around campus in floor length dinner dresses, her wild hair dyed various violent shades of fuschia or magenta.

I’m not sure how Dr Ludwick became interested in working with “the gifted” (“Doctor, are my children gifted?” “I don’t know. Do you have this month and next’s tuition payment?”) Even at eight years old I could tell her own two sons were not particularly bright. Maybe like so many things in life she just sort of fell into it. Some of the school’s students were, indeed, geniuses. One family was even prominently featured as such on “Sixty Minutes.” Most of the genius-level students were eccentric, antisocial math or science prodigies.

Two of Eldorado School’s most prominent features were: 1) no grades; and 2) no grades. This meant that students were grouped by Dr Ludwick herself into some sort of categories and so separated into classes. What those categories were was shadowy and mysterious. For all I know, she could have decided to put everyone together whose idea of a fun afternoon was debating whether the language spoken by elves is properly known as Elfish or Elven (at Eldorado there were easily enough misfits to fill a large class with these types.) We weren’t grouped by age or even skill level so much as some mysteriously amorphous “affinity.” But affinity for what? J.R.R. Tolkien, Star Wars/Trek, geodes?

The second part of the “no grades” mandate was that none of our work was evaluated or judged. Sure, we wrote essays and reports and worked on math problems or learned the difference between an isthmus and a peninsula, but there was only one test a year: the one the evil bureaucrats of the state (State) made us take to prove Dr Ludwick and her minions were actually providing us with an education worthy of state licensing.

So once a year, classrooms of students right out of Lisa Simpson’s lunch table staggered out onto the schoolyard, blinking in the sun, and showed the state examiners that we regularly did P.E. Because Dr Ludwick was in a mildly alcoholic and valium-induced haze, she’d usually stage a schoolwide baseball game, with a six foot tall, fifteen year old math genius pitching to my four year old sister.

In advance of the examiner’s visits, we were given rolls of generic paper towels and industrial strength cleaner and dispatched to the rusty, unused play equipment to remove cobwebs and black widow nests, so we could prove we were allowed to play like the real kids who got to go to public school, with its bubblegum (for unclear reasons, Dr Ludwick was extremely phobic of gum and anybody caught chewing was in severe trouble) and textbooks (we had off the cuff college style lectures or open air rap sessions with our teachers, who urged us to call them by first name; the only reason I called my teacher by the bourgeois “Mrs Brown” is that she was Greek and her first name was Ekaterina.)

The one test of the year was a two or three day extravaganza or number two pencils and filling in of bubbles. I loved it.

I dearly loved Mrs Brown. She had studied archaeology in college back in Greece, and her classroom was where I soaked up everything about skeletons found in dank European grottos, and the colorful Leakeys with their Land Rovers and bush helmets. The campus was filled with olive trees, and every year, under her Greek-villager tutelage, we’d harvest them in the classroom sinks into olive oil.

I also loved Mrs Westcott, our art teacher, whose jolly face looked like one of those dolls made out of dried apple cores. She taught me traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking, and let anyone who wanted to use a potter’s wheel and load pottery with giant paddles into the kiln. I loved our French teacher, whose name I can’t remember, but who taught us to make perfect mousse au chocolat. I was afraid of our science teacher, a disco-loving Trekkie whose snake collection slowly undulated across the floor and wound around our desks in a very distracting way. Once Dr Ludwick figured out that lunchtime disco lessons counted as “dance” with the state examiners, any pretense of actual P.E. ended and we really didn’t have to see the sun during daytime hours at all.

I hated our music teacher because he taught by fear and intimidation. I was a compliant child so that wasn’t even really the main reason I didn’t like him. My true animosity toward him began when he assigned instruments to us, blatantly choosing his favorite students for the most preferred ones, then dismissing the rest of us with a wave of the hand and, “Oh, everybody else will be flutes.” I grew to truly hate him a few days before our big Christmas concert, when he handpicked a few of us and asked us, in front of everyone, to just move our mouths silently during the actual concert. The kind of sad thing is that I probably wouldn’t have even cared (hell, I wanted us to sound good just as much as everyone else did), if he hadn’t done it so publicly.

Dr Ludwick was feted a few years ago at the 50th anniversary of Eldorado School. I didn’t attend, but I was on campus as a student for the 25th anniversary. We had a big celebration, at which Dr Ludwick read a poem and short story that explained how she came to name the school after Ponce de Leon’s lost city of gold. The problem was that I was eight or nine at the time, and was giggling with all my friends as she read aloud a fable that contained the line: “He was a gay fellow, who loved all men.” We couldn’t stop laughing and before we knew it, we missed the explanation and to this day, I can’t understand why she would name the school Eldorado. She would probably be at least eighty years old by now. If she were to die, Grandma would probably see the obituary in the Register (read only as a last resort because it’s delivered free to the home) and clip it our for me. Whatever she is doing now – maybe still administering questionable IQ tests to confused eight year olds in her dusty office – I hope she found whatever she was looking for in her quest for El Dorado.