My Date with Marcia Brady

My Date with Marcia Brady

“There was a whole magnificent soul burning brightly under her shy demeanor.”
Atticus

Everyone knew that Maureen McCormick, aka Marcia Brady, went to our high school. Maureen was a year behind me, and I sat next to her every day at lunch. She was just as cute in person as she was on TV, often dressed in a hot pink or green mini-skirt. But you have to understand the culture of the time to really follow what comes next.

The Brady Bunch was one of the top shows on television for those under twenty. The show was on Friday nights on ABC, and everyone watched it, including the majority of kids in our school.

No one wanted to admit that fact, because it wasn’t cool to watch The Brady Bunch in the era of The Who, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.

So, we all pretended not to like the show, though, secretly, every girl wanted to be Marcia Brady and every boy wanted to date her.

The funny thing is that, though Maureen and I sat next to each other, each of us had three friends on either side that sort of blocked us from the rest of the school crowd. And our friends didn’t intermingle.

Maureen was really very quiet, I guess because she was so well known to every kid in school she felt shy about interacting with them. I really saw myself as her protector, though I have no memory of anyone ever bothering her. I believe she appreciated my presence.

I was shy with her too. We were in fact so shy that we never actually spoke with each other, though we may have made eye contact once, or perhaps twice. And so, without the actual interaction of speech, I never had that date with Marcia Brady, or Maureen.

But I did watch her show on TV, every Friday night.