Free Wendy and the Lost Boys by Julie Salamon

way to my high school bazaar, and I remember watching other people on the escalator burst into tears and hold each other.”
    It was a pivotal moment, the line of demarcation between conformity and rebellion, stability and chaos. In the spirit of the times, Wendy balked at rules about what girls could wear to school, cut classes to shop at Bergdorf’s, and sneaked smokes in Riverside Park. She hung out with friends at Stark’s restaurant on Ninetieth Street and Broadway, a short walk from school, drinking cherry sodas and eating candy. She was frequently marked tardy.
    Still, Wendy was her parents’ daughter. She rebelled enough to be noticed and conformed enough to succeed. At Calhoun she helped put on plays, became editor of the Calhounder, the high-school newspaper, and wrote earnest term papers. She aimed to be original, signing her name “Wendee Wasserstein,” but sometimes she wanted to be part of the crowd, trying—with mixed success—to tame her unruly hair with rollers, hair spray, and headbands.
    “Wendy would always write her papers on time and turn them in, but on the way to school she’d run it through the gutter to make it messy,” said one of her teachers. “Part of her was quite traditional, and part of her was Wendy, her own person.”
    The burgeoning notion of female power was reinforced at Calhoun, where the girls encountered only the occasional male teacher. The school had been founded at the turn of the twentieth century as the Jacobi School, to educate the “Our Crowd” girls, the daughters of New York’s wealthy, secular Jews. Few girls went to college, but Jacobi and then Calhoun graduates were expected to be “accomplished”; many of them did go on to have careers, in either professional or volunteer work.
    The school’s character changed significantly after World War II, when Elizabeth Parmelee and Beatrice Cosmey became headmistresses. These no-nonsense women were there when Wendy arrived, a Mutt-and-Jeff combination, one tall and skinny, the other a little fireplug, overseeing their young ladies in a time of revolution. Miss Parmelee and Miss Cosmey put college prep front and center. Some quaint customs continued, however, like the annual mother-daughter luncheon and fashion show, a fund-raiser for the school, held at elegant hotels like the Plaza, the Waldorf-Astoria, and the Pierre.
    Miss Parmelee and Miss Cosmey became foils for exuberant young women and fine material for a comic writer looking back on those years. “You couldn’t wear skirts that were an inch above your knees,” Wendy recalled. “I can’t tell you how many times Miss Parmelee and Miss Cosmey, our Headmistresses at the time, sent me home to change at eight-thirty in the morning. One time, I returned to the school wearing a longer skirt and bedroom slippers.”
    The Calhounder was a proper school newspaper, dutifully reporting the results of class elections, sports tournaments, and mixers with boys’ schools (“a bevy of beauties welcomed the twenty-nine boys with great charm . . .”).
    By Wendy’s senior year, however, the paper had begun to reflect the times, ever so gently. “Where the Protests Stop . . . and Peace Begins” was the headline on an article about the U.S. war in Vietnam, urging students to send aid to the Vietnamese people. In that same issue, a play was reviewed called O the Times They Are A-Changing, an allegorical spoof of the conflict between youth and the older generation. The play was directed by a Miss Lesser, and the cast included Wendy Wasserstein, as part of “The Ditty Bop Set.”
     
    A nn-Ellen Lesser was a secretary, assistant to the headmistress, not long out of college, who began teaching philosophy as an extracurricular subject, her credential being that she had majored in philosophy in college. When the head of drama left, Miss Lesser was asked to take that over, too. It was a small school with limited resources; Wendy’s class had twenty-two girls in it.
    The girls