MONKEY THINK, MONKEY WRITE: There’s ugly, and then there’s my kind of ugly

A fews weeks ago, the Little Missuss and I were looking at the photographs of the graduating seniors that were published in the newspaper.

“What a bunch of good-looking kids,” I told her.

“Yes, I know, isn’t it something?” the Little Missuss agreed.

It truly was amazing, especially for those of us who grew up in the early ’70s or before, back when kids were mostly ugly.

I went to a pretty big high school. We had thousands in my graduating class, and the school was so huge it had its own student government and municipal airport.

Still, there were only five good-looking students in the whole school. They kept to themselves mostly, and, perhaps not surprisingly, they all married each other after they graduated from high school. It was kind of cultish.

The rest of us were so ugly the teachers kept the blinds pulled from 8 a.m. until they let us go at 3 p.m., lest someone driving past the school would look inside the classrooms and be distracted by the superpower show of homeliness.

The depressing deficit of attractive students in my high school inspired the math geeks to find a mathematical explanation for the curse. They eventually discovered the high school had a Farrah-to-Phyllis (Diller) ratio of 1:5,736.

I knew my high school had a reputation for Big Ugly before I even got there. The brothers Kelly told me story after story while I was still in middle school.

“The only good-looking girl there is just visiting,” they said.

I thought they were joking until I saw the long line of teary-eyed boys standing along the sidewalk next to the school when the exchange student walked over to the airport to get on a plane back to Sweden.

The kids were so ugly at my high school, traditional taunts didn’t work.

You know the ones I’m talking about.

“You look like you fell out of an ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

Kids in my school were so ugly, when they would hear something like that, they would agree.

“I know. And you should see my brother, the good-looking one in the family. He fell face first.”

Then someone would tease, “You’re so ugly, you can stick your face in dough and make gorilla cookies!”

The other student would say, “You know, I wondered why my mom is always asking me to help out in the kitchen. And all the time I was thinking it was because of my whisking skills.”

I used to help out in the kitchen when I was a kid, too, until my mom made me leave because

I was making the onions cry.

Next time: Sure thing, Mr. Funny Man.

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