Home Editor's Essays Where Is El Marino? Underground, Only Open After Midnight?

Where Is El Marino? Underground, Only Open After Midnight?

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[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]Summoning a maximum amount of meticulous memory, even if my union membership hinged on it, I cannot remember what the color was of my first wife’s hair. We lived together close to an hour. But I have an excuse. A nice person in eight out of 10 ways – the other two were painful zingers – she covered her hair every day. Furthermore, we lived 75 miles from my office. Who notices hair when you are concentrating on 150 miles of freeway five days a week? I think she worked weekends. Or she should have.

While it is debatable whether I may be pardoned for forgetting hirsute elements of our attempted marriage during the Vietnam War – with which there were interchangeable parallels – how do you explain El Marino Language School’s adjuncts being a high priority Culver City security secret?

Nobody outside of El Marino knew about them until last autumn?

Boys, I think we have the makings of a fantastic global spy agency here. Bin Laden couldn’t have busted through its steel net. Or did Swishy break away from his interminable series of I Love Me So Much $35,800 fundraisers to assassinate him? The world is no safer, though. The same sly Swishy who this week promised Israel advanced weaponry if they will postpone an attack on Iran until after he is safely re-elected, still is in the White House.

I digress.

I believe longtime President Debbie Hamme of the Assn. of Classified Employees when she says she did not know about the El Marino adjuncts.

She is a committed enough unionist that she would have begun her pursuit of the presumed 20 adjuncts years earlier if she had known.

Color Me Clairvoyant

Even if Ms. Hamme could guess the correct hair color of 12 to 15 El Marino adjuncts, I believe we know how this stretched-out drama is going to end.

Smiles will be scarce after the Board makes up its mind, which it has.

A 3-to-2 School Board vote to line ACE’s path to the El Marino campus with fragrant red roses will be the final score, I predict.

What happens between now and an April 10 “study session” carries a whiff of animal, as in dog-and-pony.

Hay There, Time to Bale

That ain’t hay around the necks of the Other Three Board members. It is called cement. After a certain number of marriages, a journalist can deduce when a representative of the opposite – or is it opposing? – sex has planted her not necessarily dainty toes.

The outcome looks cooked and ready to serve to me.

No doubt the delay is defendable.

The research will be authoritative and formful, likely not revealing.

I believe the parents are destined to finish second in the looming showdown.

Possibly, the Board majority of the Other Three will seek to pacify the determined parent community. They may devise a leaky bucket of watered-down language. This is known as legislative tomfoolery.

Although Geoff Maleman’s nearby story says that “several” fellow School Board members had not seen Laura Chardiet’s splendid four-point fix-it proposal made at last week’s meeting, even someone as slow as a fire hydrant could have understood what she was saying.

Ms. Chardiet read slowly and clearly.