R.I.P. Judi

Teacher Appreciation Day was two months ago, and I came this close to doing a long-planned piece on my Freshman English teacher, Judi Scott. For whatever reason I ducked it, not for the first time either. As always seems to happen though, death has forced my hand. I have never been shy about telling her straight to her face how much she meant to me, since reconnecting with her about a dozen years ago. No regrets there. But it does remain for me to commit a few thoughts to writing.

There is a more recent photo of Judi next to her obit on the local funeral home’s website, but it didn’t quite cut it for me. I grabbed this pic out of an old yearbook because this is how I will always think of her.

Was I hot for teacher? I tell you frankly: 100%. When she was young (she was about 30 at the time), Ms. Preble, as she was known then, reminded me a little of English actresses like Diana Rigg or Jenny Agutter. The surname Preble is Anglo of course, but Judi was also part Portuguese (alluded to here) so there was a hint of exoticism in her make-up as well. (Haha, is that why she won the “Rosanne Rosanna Danna Award?” See picture above. I have no idea what that was about). Anyway, Judy was very kind, generous, funny, and worldly in a way that’s catnip to a teenager.

A lot of the books Judi assigned were ones that she had a passion about or a connection to. She brought a lot of stuff to the conversation that would grab us. I wish I’d kept all my schoolwork from back then, or a diary, because it is hard for me to remember which teacher introduced me to which work of literature, but it seems to me that with Judi we read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (while also watching the film, and talking a bit about Kesey’s legendary life), and also Being There (which came out as a movie at around the time, and whose author Jerzy Kosiński Judi had known somehow, maybe she had taken a class with him). I feel like we may have read Waiting for Godotwith her, and also went to see the production at Trinity Rep. She also mentioned more than once that she had dated fellow Rhode IslanderJames Woods, then best known for The Onion Fields and Holocaust. (In recent years, she gently chided me for putting him down, but c’mon, the guy’s a full-on Nazi now).

A lot of the class was about writing. Here is where I am so glad that I had Judi as a teacher at this stage in my life. Do you know that movie Charley with Cliff Robertson, where a mentally challenged man is given some sort of treatment that turns him into a genius overnight? Without overstating either the degree to which I have been either “challenged” or a “genius”, I went through an experience that felt markedly similar when I was around 13 years old. I mean, it was like a balloon blowing up. It happened so quickly. It was disorienting, exciting, exhilarating, scary, possibly dangerous. I was precocious to the max, completely detached from reality. I have never been more alienated from other people in my life, and that’s saying much. I grew my hair out to heavy-metal length, started wearing army surplus gear, and actually sported a set of dog tags inscribed with what I decided my new name would be in the coming New World Order: “Socrates Genesis One”. Inspired by Shaw, I invented my own alphabet. I was learning about Nietzsche and Marx. (From someplace. Other teenagers? Record albums?) I used to write my school papers with a FOUNTAIN pen. In retrospect, these and other peculiarities and eccentricities at the time were symptoms of abuse and an unhappy home life. Teachers can probably read it right away. I was lucky to have had a few at this time in my life who were crucial to my getting to the other side in one piece. I wrote about my Latin teacher here. I feel like I write about another, my theatre teacher, just about every single day just by existing, but I did write an essay about her as well. And there was Judi. She indulged me shamelessly, which was precisely what I needed. Life at home was suffocating, demeaning. To get all of this positive reinforcement for writing what was in my head, it was like breathing nitrous oxide.

I’ve always remembered one time when I made her real mad though. She had assigned us to write an essay about our idea of what utopia would be like. I can’t remember why. It seems unlikely that we read the Thomas More book at that young age, but maybe we read an abridgement, or a photocopied section of it, or something. At any rate, my essay was about how I didn’t believe in utopia, that the search for utopia had always been the scourge of mankind, it always leads to misery and totalitarianism, and so forth. I have no idea why it enraged her so that I took this tack, which I still stand by, btw. I think maybe she thought I would go the opposite way, since I was so intrigued by the horrors of the 20th century. (A lot of kids were back then; I don’t know if they still are). She seemed to be mad that I didn’t do the assignment. To my mind, on the contrary, I did do the assignment. I wrote an essay containing my views on utopia.

I was so thrilled to reconnect with Judi after I myself had become a writer. She came to a launch event for my book Chain of Fools in Providence about a dozen years ago. And this is when I began to gush about her influence on me, which she characteristically downplayed. By then she was retired and seemed to spend most of her time tearing around the ocean with her husband on a sailboat. We kept in pretty good touch, though. Also, her nephew was a college friend of my son’s, so there was always something to chat about. Unfortunately, her husband (who has since passed) had an accident in 2018, and a lot of her last years were filled with caring for him. She was particularly upset that he was in the same institution that houses a certain notorious person I wrote about here just a couple of days ago.

I have alluded to Judi elsewhere on Travalanche. She had conducted an oral history project about the Hurricane of 1938, which I wrote about here. Some day I was hoping to maybe work up a screenplay about that disaster and was hoping to talk to her about it. She was only 77! I figured we had plenty of time! I was not ready to get this bad news. We never are. Now I have another reason to be sad on the Fourth of July.

Learn more about Judi Scott from her official obit here.