Rant #2,295: Face the Face

I welcome myself back to the Blog today after taking a day off to tie up some personal matters.

It ended up being a very fruitful day, and that is pretty much where I am going to leave it now.

Let's move on to some more important matters ...

The other day, I told you about my old college newspaper article about the Russ Meyer movie "Up!" and its star, the beauteous Raven de la Croix.

I looked, and looked, and looked through my house, and alas, I could not find my book of articles that I wrote during my college years.

Well, Adelphi University, which has archived the history of my late-lamented Dowling College, may have come to the rescue.

They have located the article, and they are going to try to send it to me this week.

Stay tuned on this one, because if they can accomplish that, we are all in for a great laugh ... I will certainly keep you abreast of the situation (sorry, I could not help it).

Now, onto something else related to my past endeavors ...

I often talk about growing up in the then brand new community known as Rochdale Village, in South Jamaica, Queens, but I had a history elsewhere before my family and I moved to the new development in 1964.

I was born in Brooklyn in 1957--heck, that is now so long ago that the Dodgers still played at Ebbets Field when I was an infant--and I believe we lived on Avenue N.

In 1958, my family--just me, my father and mother at this time--moved to the wilds of Queens in a place called Kew Gardens Hills, a hardscrabble area of the borough made up of garden apartments and a solid blue collar middle class community.

I don't remember exactly what street we lived on, but Kew Gardens Hills became a notorious area in the early to mid 1960s for two disparate cases that rocked New York and the nation, the Kitty Genovese case--where a young woman was attacked, called out for help, and most people who heard her cries ignored them--and the Alice Crimmins case, where just around the corner from where I lived, the pretty woman in a dead marriage supposedly killed her kids and put them in a dumpster.

Anyway, during my time there, I went from a toddler to a young child, and eventually began my school career there, going to kindergarten at P.S. 165 in neighboring Flushing.

The school was a very good one--and still is, by all accounts that I have read--and it was also quite experimental, and I was part of that experiment.

The New York City schools were just a few years away from a major transition, but the Board of Education wanted to see how much learning kids could absorb, so in my school, I guess they took their best and brightest kindergarteners and when they moved on to first grade, I was in a somewhat experimental class where we learned three years worth of schooling in one single year.

In other words, I was taught first, second and third grade lessons in first grade.

So when my peers were basically getting into Dick and Jane, I was getting into multiplication, division and reading books of 100 pages or more.

That is what happens when you have a 12th grade reading level in first grade, and I can thank DC and Marvel comic books for that.

Anyway, as is traditional with New York schools, my class took our class picture that year, without our regular teacher.

Mrs. Gold was tabbed to teach our class. To show you how experimental this class really was, she was a matronly woman--probably in her 60s--who had never taught elementary school before, only having taught at the college level.

Anyway, I can tell you that we were a bit much for her, rambunctious as any first grade class could be, as we reveled in our smartness and our growing bodies and minds.

One day, while showing us a projection strip about something or other, the poor lady tripped over the wire of the projector, broke her leg right then and there, and she never came back to class.

So when the photo was taken, Mrs. Gold was gone, and I haven't the vaguest idea who the teacher was in the photo. I assume it was her replacement, but I do not remember her name, but she was much, much younger than Mrs. Gold, that's for sure.

Anyway, the iconic New York City school photo pose had not been developed yet, and as you can see by the photo--which I had forgotten about, but which my mother found in a drawer in her bedroom a few years ago--we were all over the place in the room when this was taken, and why my mother circled me is anyone's guess.

I have very scant recollections of the people in the photo. The kid making that weird Bela Lugosi-like gesture on the left side of the photo was our class clown, but heaven knows what his name was.

There is a Hal in the front desk on the right side sitting behind our class clapboard, and there is a David in there, in the back right by the teacher with a cross tie and a crewcut.

But other than that, I truly do not remember the other people in the photo.

But a question has come up in my mind, and that is the crux of this Blog entry today.

The girl sitting in the back of the photo on the far right, right in front of the picture of the circus tent ... the more I look at her, the more I think I know who she is.

Do you? Look at her, and project what she might look like more than 50 years after this photo was taken sometime late in the school year in spring 1964.

Look, take a hard look at that girl, and do you know who that is?

I think I do.

Are you thinking what I am thinking?

That is a photo of actress Fran Drescher when she was six or seven years old!

This all came to me as I was looking over the photo the other day, looking at the people in the photo and trying to remember who they were.

I got to this girl, and it all came to me like a heap of bricks falling on my head.

Look, it is public knowledge that Drescher grew up in Flushing, and she is my age and went to P.S. 165 just like I did way back when.

So yes, looking at the photo, looking at the face, that, to me, is "The Nanny," decades before the fact.

She has probably had some plastic surgery done over the years, so perhaps you might not think that it is an exact fit, but there is something in the nose and cheeks that lead me to believe that this little girl and this mature TV star are one and the same person.

So what I did is that I sent the school photo and a blow up of her picture to every Fran Drescher site I could find, trying to find out if that was, in fact, her.

I have not yet heard anything back about this, but if I do, I will let you know.

But I do think that that is her, and unless anyone tells me differently, I am going to say that that is her.

I just hope that I am correct in my assumption.

What do you think?