In Honor of Sarah Marshall: A Break-Up Tale

Editor's Note: Here's our own Jane Black with some musings on a broken heart... feel free to weigh in with your own, so long as they are hilarious.

As a long-married type, it's been quite a few years since I reminisced about past break-ups, but the release of Forgetting Sarah Marshall brought them to mind. I was always the breaker, never the breakee. Regardless, any break-up takes an emotional toll, and I guess the first cut is definitely the deepest. For me, the first cut happened in junior high.

I was in eighth grade, assigned to the home ec homeroom. This homeroom was all girls, and was noted for consistently winning the spirit prize at pep rallies, not as stunning an achievement as it sounds when you consider the combined power of 30 teenaged girl larynges. We're talking aural shock and awe here. Kids in the homerooms next to us in the bleachers reported diminished hearing and ringing ears for hours afterwards.

In one of those perfect symmetry situations you cannot make up, one of the homerooms seated next to us was the shop homeroom, all male, and including a boy with the most even, chocolatey skin, the longest, blackest, curliest eyelashes, and the plumpest, smoothest lips I had ever beheld. He had a nice, shy grin, even white teeth, and a round, immaculately groomed 'fro. (Did I mention this was 1970?) He looked like Jermaine Jackson. I don't know what I looked like, but the two of us had been eyeballing each other for weeks.

Through delicate maneuvering and consummate diplomacy, it transpired that, at one pep rally, he and I were seated at the shop-home ec border. I don't remember what the cheer was, or who the opposing team was. I only recall the haze in my eyes as he leaned in, touched my knee, and asked me if I would be his steady.

Tenderly, I whispered, "I want to but I'll have to ask my mother." (Hey! These were more innocent times.)

And I did. My mother got the funniest look on her face and asked me, "What's this boy's name?" The answer to which I did not actually know. Then my mother got up to get a drink, and stayed away a looong time. (Note to Mom: Thanks for not laughing in front of me. You're aces.) When she came back, she gave me some sensible guidelines for this sort of thing, without making a recommendation one way or the other.

The next day at school I accosted my potential beloved in the hallway and told him that even though we didn't even know each others' names, I was flattered he'd asked me, I'd like to know him better, he was welcome to walk me to and from classes, we could sit together if he had fourth period lunch too, but "steady" was too serious and I must respectfully decline. He said, "Huh?"

"Yesterday, you know, you asked me to go steady."

"Huh?

"At the pep rally?"

"Huh?"

And I noticed that he seemed… taller.

Further conversation revealed snaggly teeth, blotchy skin, and, more importantly, that he was not in the shop homeroom. In fact, my suitor of the day before was his younger brother whose name I never got.

The story got around pretty fast. Though sympathetic, my parents did not let me transfer to a school across town.

*****

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