My memoir of innocent childhood KID STUFF keeps growing by leaps and bounds. This is to announce its latest instalment (the ninth if I’m not mistaken). I call it SHORT SHORTS for what is perhaps the most impactful image in the adolescent chapter.

Covering most of my junior year in a new high school with new friends, this chapter describes a teenaged me escaping from two very tenacious cults. One, a popular religious cult, I kicked by spiritual means, and the other, a romantic celebrity cult, simply died on the vine.

I escaped from the Catholic cult by rejecting its myths and dogmas as unnecessarily complex and nonsensical phantasms, replacing them with a new personal creed around the biblical instruction simply to love each other. It was liberating, opening my heart to affection for everybody, girl or boy. Free of sexual under- or over-tones, I practiced it at every opportunity.

Escaping from fanatical, platonic fantasies of Annette Funicello was a much slower process. In this third year of my passion for her, that spring I got flooded with her guest spots acting on TV programs. However, this older Annette, now a professional actress, was a disappointing virtual reality, and I came to see that my obsessive love for her was insanity.

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