Aden Bowman

Aden Bowman Collegiate, besides having been the high school of Joni Mitchell, had one other unique feature to it’s courses. If you were an enriched student, you probably took the psychology class. And that was the best class, because it was so weird! And Ms. Beatty could always find some way to relate the subject matter to her own life, which was so awesome because then you wanted to know more about her, she was trippy! She put a quarter to her head one day for like, fifteen minutes, just to prove she could, and then she talked about how.

I remember she started teaching us about cults and MPD and all kinds of weird mind control shit, and how to get people out of cults, and how brainwashing worked. It was a weird month, she’d show us a movie, she’d be like “And now class, part one, of Sybil!” And we’d be like WTF? And then she’d come back next class “Part two, of Sybil!” And we’re like what the hell is with Sybil? Poor Sally Field, man, was a weird movie. But we got it, it was such a rare sounding phenomenon though. And then when we learned about cults, it was another movie with some girl getting involved in some goofy cult. And there was one part in the movie where they were just jumping up and chanting over and over, and it didn’t make any sense, the chant, not for us anyway. And Renee was like “Are they chanting “Juicyfruit Juicyfruit?” And that was such an awesome idea, because if you wanted a cult of free thinkers you would make them chant about something that made no sense what so ever.

“Juicy fruit, juicy fruit, ra ra ra!”

Anyway, I remember some friends of mine and I were bored and had nothing to do and Heather just got a new crappy car and someone, probably Chris, said “Let’s go bother that cult outside of town!” And we were like, yeah, that is like such a good idea! And we drove out there and were snoopy little assholes and they chased us down the road in a truck. And we were all “OMG! Like, you guys, they were so mad! What do you think they’re doing? They’re freaks!” Anyway, I think since then that whole generation has been trying to figure out if Sybil really exists.