Blast from the Past: June 11, 1999

Across the school, seniors are neglecting their books and making preparations for their exit from the school they've known and loved for the past four years. Seniors obsessing over what college they, their friends, and their classmates are spending their next four years at should check out the Neirad graduation issue from 1999, a full decade ago. Perhaps a relative or a friend graduated from Darien High School this year, but if not, read up on a few unsung seniors and sneak a peek at some ten-year-old prom pics!

"This Is It! The Final Brian DiMenna on the Town!" By Brian DiMenna

NEIRAD enilno edition

Load printer friendly version

The long road has finally come to an abrupt end. The monthly column in each issue of Neirad will finally be gone. You will have to grow and lead your own lives without me. For this is the final edition of Brian DiMenna on the Town. It has spanned two years since my monthly food reviews landed me my own highly informative column. I know we have all grown a lot since then so let's, if we may, take some time to reflect back on four years of high school. Which I guess basically means I'll just make fun of everybody and then run away.

When we arrived in these harrowed halls, Neirad was just a simple pamphlet of useless information, the great eight had plans to continue grilling at the PCP, (unfortunately the group split, despite predictions that they would meet until 2020), Billy Cooling was just a kid who dreamed of more, Brian Hutter wrote his first joke, (jokes that would later bring him deserved fame through a commonly visited website), and a young Brian DiMenna was enrolled in accelerated English. My how times have changed.

Then we were greeted with a few new faces at our school. Leonard Linnet gave us the gift that would keep on giving the whole year round, Igor. I think he had a lasing impact on all of us at this school. Then of course we were greeted with the brightest star of them all, a future leader, Scott Ishii. He came simply armed with his grand am and selection of tighty whities. Sure he's changed a lot over the years, but the warmth he has brought has perhaps touched us all. After the arrival of the eccentric Ishii, the last student to join this class of 1999 was a youngster who was simply, Watson. Ah, Watson.

Although the new faces helped to brighten the school the fine facility was more than enough to keep us all smiling. I will miss being surrounded by cinder block, and that weird cork stuff they use for the ceilings. Where does on purchase this unusual ceiling substance? I heard they got it at "Celings, ceilings, ceilings." Now some of you might complain about our fine facility, but I say who needs heat and air conditioning, not I. It's 75 degrees in my head all the time.

Plus I think it was more fun to go to a school that had that great institutional feel. It was kind of like a sweat shop in here, wasn't it? Some might say that perhaps that made it a little bit too much of a womanlike atmosphere, but think of all the great electives we were offered that other schools aren't. There was that great course, Nike manufacturing where our professor instructed us to work making shoes for 20 hours a day, with no light, water, or food. That was a pretty good course I thought.

However, for me, the Darien school system is not just a fine high school. My life has been molded by the fine Darien system. From Tokeneke through the high school, I was bred a Darien man. But reflecting back on my years here, sometimes I often wonder a little about some of the curriculum.

For example what was that origami lesson we got at Tokeneke? Why was it so necessary that six year olds learn the ancient Japanese art of folding paper? I remember spending hours on end making cranes, and those weird diamond balls that I never figured otu what to do with. The fact that little kids' grades depended on their ability to make these little creations never quite made sense to me. I think the procedure of making these contraptions stayed with me for about a month. If you handed me a piece of paper right now and told me to make something out of it, I could make a ball. "How's this, I folding it?"

The next odd little course was the month or so we spent in fifth grade at Hindley studying economics. I remember learning how to write checks back then. Is writing checks so urgent that we must teach ten-year olds the proper procedure to? Has the great state of Connecticut deemed this to be areal problem amongst young people? Have the children been bouncing checks, are store-owners complaining due to all of the incorrectly filled-out checks they are receiving from eight year olds? Was that guy, who owns the Puritan, getting fooled by clever youngsters with their phony checks? Perhaps they wanted to drive the joy of business into their children's heads immediately.

After 12 years of public education some of us are leaving, with our fundamentals at hand, and that is sad.

We are heading toward the future; that may sound silly since we are always heading towards the future, but now the future is different than the present.

Can you dig? So perhaps many of you are wondering just where will Brian DiMenna be in ten years? Well, I will tell you. I'm pretty sure I will get to college one of these days, then it is off to my parents' house where I will most likely stay for about fifteen years. I will most likely be performing bad stand-up comedy at Yuck Yuck's til midnight, before settling into a job in distribution. I'm not sure exactly what I'll be distributing, but the profession of distribution will be my calling. Then of course I will strike oil in my backyard and become a billionaire, just like the Beverly Hillbillies. As for all of you, you will most likely be very unhappy, and die young of a brain tumor.

So let me just say to my fellow classmates: I have enjoyed knowing each and every one of you, even you. Yes you too, over there. So let me leave you all with one last BD piece of advice. Never date a women with a tattoo of a dagger on her arm, don't play cards with a guy whose last name is a city, and always get 12 hours of sleep, you do that, and the rest is just cream cheese.

View more articles from the
NEIRAD Archives