Sabrina Scherff may not have known it at the time, but she was one of my chief rivals in junior high school. Sabrina was the only seventh grader at Los Alisos Intermediate School to get a higher grade in honors English than me (don’t ask me why that pale-faced autocrat Mrs. Crawford put signs on the wall showing the top five grades in each of her sections). Two years in a row, Sabrina won the grade-level spelling bee while I only finished in the Top 10 and jealousy raged through my veins. At “graduation,” she got to give a speech as a valedictorian – something little Jamshid was prohibited from doing solely because of his mediocre marks in P.E. And now, while I take a nap every day and grovel at the feet of middle-aged white men for a job that doesn’t involve my voice on the wrong end of a Drive Thru squawk-box, she’s one of the 24 finalists on American Idol’s sixth season. So in that sense, not much has changed in 15 years – Sabrina Scherff is still kicking my butt and making me look bad (even if no one but me is keeping score).
Memo to Sabrina Scherff-Sloan: you may have gone to Northwestern and become “urbanized” (re: black), moved to New York and performed in Broadway musicals, married a Sloan so you could drop the maiden-name Scherff like it was yesterday’s news, and deceptively claimed that your hometown is Studio City (where’s the love for Mission Viejo, Sabrina?), but to me you’ll always be that puffy-haired pre-teen who kicked my trash in Mrs. Crawford’s class. Good luck, Sabrina; although I won’t be watching the shows, I'll be rooting for you in my own way.
Caveat: my brother goes to Mission Viejo High School, the same school Sabrina did. (As the Turtle proudly proclaims, I went to Trabuco Hills, which “corrupted” me so much that my parents had to send my two younger siblings to a neighboring school in order to keep Royah and Steven from following in my wayward footsteps, but that’s a whole other ball of wax for another day.) I found out about Sabrina going Top-24 b/c when I was down in Calif. last week thawing out, my drama-geek brother was going on and on about how a former drama student from his school was on American Idol and how he had to watch her perform (uninterested, I ignored the television as I won the Super Bowl for the umpteenth time via Madden 07 on my lapper). After the show, we were bumping around on the internet and Steven showed me the MVHS drama website that was trumping up its alumnus. It of course took me two seconds to blurt out, “That’s Sabrina Scherff!” Now if Sabrina goes Top-12, it’s already lined up that my brother will interview her for his school’s televised morning news program, which of course would entail the inevitable off-camera exchange, “Remember a kid named Jamie Askar from junior high school? That’s my brother!!” Needless to say, I’m breathless with anticipation. Either that, or I really couldn’t care less. Hibachi!!
Caveat: my brother goes to Mission Viejo High School, the same school Sabrina did. (As the Turtle proudly proclaims, I went to Trabuco Hills, which “corrupted” me so much that my parents had to send my two younger siblings to a neighboring school in order to keep Royah and Steven from following in my wayward footsteps, but that’s a whole other ball of wax for another day.) I found out about Sabrina going Top-24 b/c when I was down in Calif. last week thawing out, my drama-geek brother was going on and on about how a former drama student from his school was on American Idol and how he had to watch her perform (uninterested, I ignored the television as I won the Super Bowl for the umpteenth time via Madden 07 on my lapper). After the show, we were bumping around on the internet and Steven showed me the MVHS drama website that was trumping up its alumnus. It of course took me two seconds to blurt out, “That’s Sabrina Scherff!” Now if Sabrina goes Top-12, it’s already lined up that my brother will interview her for his school’s televised morning news program, which of course would entail the inevitable off-camera exchange, “Remember a kid named Jamie Askar from junior high school? That’s my brother!!” Needless to say, I’m breathless with anticipation. Either that, or I really couldn’t care less. Hibachi!!
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