The Santa Fe Hotel

We had a leisurely drive to our Hostess Twinkie Convention—and checked into the lovely Santa Fe Hotel there on Sixth Avenue.

I tipped the maîtres d'hôtel—so that we could ensconce ourselves in the exquisite “Wood Bloxom” bridal suite up on the third floor.

After all, that corner suite had many fond memories for me—just thinking about it makes me weep with fake nostalgic joy and ersatz melancholy tears.

So many fond bitter-sweet memoires even now pervade that ever so gracious former classroom—with its precious view from way up there of quaint abandoned Sixth Avenue far down below.

If my sweet bride only knew—the profane history of that former tacky loathsome classroom. Remodeled and transformed now—into a coy pretty little Bridal Suite.

It’s almost as if it were just yesterday—the ancient gnarled gargoyle face of the Lord and Master Wood Bloxom scowling down at the huddled flock of shy little innocent lambs that were unlucky enough to be stuck in his stultifyingly boring Algebra and Plane Geometry class back in the primitive 1960’s.

No teacher like bitchy snarling Wood Bloxom would ever be tolerated in the American school system today—but back then his almost half-a-century tenure had fixed him in stone for the Eternal Ages. If not Maplewood Cemetery—where he’d eventually end up like the rest of them.

Even my mother had walked those very same hallways and sat in the same classrooms as I did twenty years earlier. She graduated in the Class of 1942—during those dark War Years looming over the ruins of the Great Depression Midwest. Her various Yearbooks are film noir flashbacks—to a time that's hard for me to imagine.

She knew only too well—what Wood Bloxom was really like because he was teaching even back then. The same with Anita B. Rice, Ed Price, Marion Howard, Lois Jaquith—teachers that I was so lucky or not so lucky to have as teachers myself.

Each one a living breathing caricature of themselves—indelibly set in their ways like the cracks in the jagged limestone sidewalks I walked on going down Constitution Street on my way to that strange rather beloved EHS everyday.

And now here I was back in this lovely Neo-Classical former high school Convention Center—the classy, swanky Santa Fe Hotel. How lucky I was to cozy up to my sweetheart tonight—here in Wood Bloxom’s petite little comfy Bridal Suite.

Of course, it raised some eyebrows at the reception desk—when I flaunted my Gay Marriage Certificate from the radical State of Massachusetts. We were the first gay couple—to check into the grand Hotel.

But as bitchy Linda Darnell said in that classic Hollywood film noir trashy Fallen Angel (1945)—“So what?”