She was built like a WWII tank, short but mighty in a square steely reliable way, complete with a dome of short cropped hair and a metal-rimmed pair of glasses that seemed embedded into her nose and cheeks. I never saw her without her glasses firmly in place. If I’d known it at the time , known what a lesbian was, I would have recognized Miss Acree as a dyke, along with the slender Miss Tippen who taught Civics and the relatively femme Miss Standsbury who taught English, but all I knew was that there were these strong, smart, commanding women who
challenged the very Atlanta notion of womanhood, and I also knew they were my favorite teachers at the North Fulton High School.
I also had a rather weird crush on Mr. Cook, the slender, reed-like, tall and expressive Art Teacher who never ever seemed to quite fit into the raucous hallways of that old building. He always seemed to me a rare flower in the wrong garden. But I noticed I did think of him as a flower…weird, when all the surrounding male ideals were stinky, burly, muscular footballl player man/boys, with nary a flower among them.
Anyway, Miss Acree taught Economics on our 10th grade level, and I can remember the smell of her chalk. She loved writing on her blackboard and did it with so much gusto behind her scrawling that sometimes the chalk would break into dust.
Miss Acree, the tank, did everything forcefully, including speaking the following sentences:
“EVERYTHING IN LIFE IS ECONOMICS!!! AND THIS MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT CLASS YOU EVER TAKE!”
None of us had any idea what the heck she was proclaiming about, but having nailed us to our desks with her energetic statement, she proceeded to teach us:
“It’s all give and take,” she went on. “Every single moment in your life is either buy or sell, or give and take; nothing stands still, because it takes energy to exist and that energy is what economics is all about. Push and pull, barter ( I’ll explain that concept soon) and trade, acquiring one thing at the necessary expense of another. Life is Economics.”
And we were off!
Off into the shifting of our world on its axis- at least my world! Because, remembering her in front of her class that day saying those things she so enthusiastically bestowed upon us, I understood some basic things about life that I had never even begun to think about: profit and loss, value and greed, winning and losing, the adding up of life into neat columns of advantage over misfortune, smartness over stupidity, the green of gain over the red of listed losses. That day, green became my favorite color.
I began to live a kind of teenaged life of commerce. By then, I knew I wanted to be an actress, but of course worked in our local community theater for no pay. Still , I chalked up all my extracurricular activities as actual pro jobs and was intent on staying constantly employed as “ the kid “ around Theatre Atlanta. I liked boys, usually the nerdy ones in Chorus who liked books, but could see Miss Acree’s philosophy in each little romance, the sweaty backseat give and take of each one. I understood that for each breath I took, I’d pay for it with a release of song, quip, cleverness or some other attempt at defining who I thought myself to be.
I learned a lot from Miss Acree.
I embraced Economics like it was Shakespeare’s finest work. I became a mogul of innocence and striving.
I kept count.