Sunnydale Yearbook?

[johnprester.livejournal.com]

I've heard from a contact who doesn't want to be named, and although I've sometimes found him unreliable, he has pointed me toward some interesting info in the past.

He claims to have seen a copy of the Sunnydale High 1999 yearbook (copies of which, even taking the Collapse into account, are scarce) and he noted some interesting stuff about Buffy Summers. Remember that I have no verification for any of this, but it is suggestive.

First of all, there is the matter of the section where the students' mugshots are lined up in alphabetical order. Summers' picture is missing. Not only that, there is only one photo of her in the entire book.

I've seen the Hemery Middle School yearbook, and Summers is practically on every page. Cheerleader, Fashion Club, student government, she was clearly one of the popular kids. Certainly she was one of the most visible. But her presence in Sunnydale High seems to have left no evidence -- or else that evidence was removed before the book was published.

Even stranger is the one photo of her that remains in the book. It was taken at the awards ceremony at the Senior Prom. The caption reads "Buffy Summers -- Class Protector."

Assuming this is true, does anyone have a clue what it means? I got nothin'.

Comments

Simple answer high school cliques

[samthereaderman.livejournal.com]

It means that Summers ran afoul of either the yearbook photo editor or the main yearbook editor. High school is all about cliques, especially for girls. See Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wanna Bees, for instance. All this means is that in one school the girl ran with the popular crowd, in the other school she didn't (not surprising since it was a small town with people who had grown up together while Summers was a stranger).

I suspect that if you look at any high school yearbook, you'll see a small group of people dominating most of it. If you're not in any clubs and activities or sports, and if you aren't one of the popular people, you're in the class snapshots (unless absent that day) and that's it.

As for the Class protector, proms have lots of strange awards and in-jokes. They're hardly worth bothering about.

Re: Simple answer high school cliques

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I suspect that if you look at any high school yearbook, you'll see a small group of people dominating most of it.

So who dominates the yearbook? Any familiar names? Is Faith Lehane in there? Jonathan Levinson?

Re: Simple answer high school cliques

[johnprester.livejournal.com]

As I said, I haven't seen it myself. My contact doesn't say he has a copy, only that he's seen one.

But, you know I would ask about Lehane. No, she's not. She doesn't even have a mug shot, or even a blank space where one should go like Summers has. Which makes sense; she was a highschool dropout even in Boston, wound up in Sunnydale more or less by chance as far as I know, and I doubt she'd be the type to drop back in.

And yes, there are other names on my list to ask about. Jonathan Levinson has the standard mug shot, and he's in the background of the photo of Summers getting the award (which my friend tells me is a really tacky gold-lame umbrella, with sequins glued to it).

As for who dominates -- it's mainly Cordelia Chase. Partly that could be her family money; her dad was the richest man in Sunnydale until the IRS arrested him for tax fraud just a month or two before graduation. But she was head cheerleader, had a driver's license and her own car in her junior year (according to California DMV records), and so on.

And as I've posted in another thread, she moved to LA, tried to break into acting, but wound up as the secretary for Angel Investigations. Shortly after the LA Darkness, most of the staff of AI became the Board of Directors of Wolfram and Hart, but Chase fell into a coma for some reason, and died in early 2004.

Re: Simple answer high school cliques

[wandhvictim.livejournal.com]

if there are prom pictures check out who else was there. i heard rest of W&H board were there, got no proof.

Re: Simple answer high school cliques

[johnprester.livejournal.com]

Again: I don't have access to the book itself. I have a source who claims to have seen it. I can try to find out more, but this is second-hand information at best. And my source can be unreasonably skittish, so I may get nothing.

Re: Simple answer high school cliques

[samthereaderman.livejournal.com]

Head cheerleader dominates yearbook. What a surprise. Not!

Now speaking of Jonathan Levinson, one thing I don't understand. Supposedly, in his senior year he tried to commit suicide. But he had a sniper rifle and was caught in the school's outdoor tower, coincidently by that Summers girl the conspiracy theorists here are always yammering about. And this was just a few weeks after Columbine.

If one goes to the highest place on campus with a sniper rifle, it's a pretty good guess suicide isn't on your mind, unless it is suicide by cop.

Re: Simple answer high school cliques

[johnprester.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously there's nothing odd about the sort of girl Chase seems to have been dominating the yearbook. What's interesting about her is what happened after she graduated. Kinda makes you wonder how that sort of person gets caught up in whatever weird doings were going on.

Then again, Buffy Summers used to be that sort of girl too, and then she dropped off the popularity radar like the Marie Celeste.

As for Levinson, I would take anything we "know" about him with a huge grain of salt. Do you remember where you heard about the suicide thing? And do you have documentation? Because without verification, we can't really trust even our own memories where he's concerned.

I myself have a distinct memory of seeing him on the news during Desert Storm, shaking Norman Schwarzkopf's hand. But I have no idea where or in what context, and in fact he couldn't have been there, since he'd have been about ten years old at the time. I can't begin to tell you how creepy that is.

Re: Simple answer high school cliques

[samthereaderman.livejournal.com]

As I said this was right after Columbine. Every incident involving guns and schools was over-hyped by the media. I'm sure I read about it in one of the many, many articles about schoolkids and guns but I can't remember where exactly.

Re: Simple answer high school cliques

[dsample.livejournal.com]

Jonathan Levinson is in it. He's listed as being a member of the chess, and science clubs, and on the swim team. He also apparently made the "Class Protector" presentation to Buffy Summers.

Strangely, there is a "superlatives" section in which he is listed as being "Most Likely to Be Famous" (along with some girl named Cordelia Chase)

Also strange: Buffy Summers is on that page as "Most Likely to Be Imprisoned."

Re: Simple answer high school cliques

[johnprester.livejournal.com]

You've seen a copy? Or are you just passing along what you've heard?

Not doubting you; just collating data, as they say.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I've heard this one before, and never heard a good explanation for it.

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

There's one big fat hole in this story: high school annuals have a deadline which is months before the spring prom, so that they available for autographs during the week before graduation, and the likelyhood that any pictures from the 1999 prom would be in the 1999 annual is vanishingly small.

(spelling error in first comment)

[johnprester.livejournal.com]

That's right, it would be a problem, wouldn't it? My HS didn't have a yearbook, so I didn't realize. But of course it would have to be the case. Well, I did say my contact's reliability was in question.

But then, ffutures said he'd heard about the Class Protector thing from somewhere else. So it's not out of the question that such a picture would exist. Just not in the yearbook.

I'm gonna have to dig deeper, I guess.

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

Sounds as if your source might have more direct memories of that prom than just having seen a picture in an annual; ever wonder what band played at the prom? Who were the chaperones? Was it catered? There must have been witnesses more attentive to what was going on than just the students (who on prom night are most probably paying more attention to their chances of after-prom activities than anything else).

[johnprester.livejournal.com]

Or maybe he made the whole thing up. Or maybe the picture really is in the yearbook, meaning they rush-printed it at the last minute for some reason.

That's the problem with this particular contact. You never can tell.

Then again, dsample's post leads me to believe that he's seen the book as well, and he refers to the prom photo.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

It might have once been true that the yearbook deadline was months before the Prom, but these days there are companies that will print a run of a few hundred books for you with only a couple of weeks turnaround time, at quite reasonable rates. You supply them with an electronic copy of the text, and cover art, and a couple of weeks later FedEx drops them off on your doorstep.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Sure - Lightning Source etc. can do this, printing PDFs, but the quality is lousy unless you pay REALLY big bucks.

fast print

[samthereaderman.livejournal.com]

But aren't we talking about 1999? I'm pretty sure print on demand is newer than that.

Re: fast print

[dsample.livejournal.com]

1999 wasn't the stone age. Most of the profitable Internet services already had someone offering them by then.

Yearbooks

[demonbrat-98.livejournal.com]

Just found this thread--not sure how I missed it. Anyway, I went to three separate high schools (military brat) and at all three of them yearbooks for the previous year did not come in until September of the next school year. If you had graduated, you had to come pick it up or send someone to get it for you and there was no way to get it signed (I always thought around Christmas the school should have a little party for the grads, but I digress). So it is possible that there were prom pictures in it.

Jenn

Re: Yearbooks

[surprisepizza.livejournal.com]

But as the school was destroyed at graduation, isn't it unlikely, if this is the case, that the yearbook would ever be produced?

Then again, this could explain the rarity of the yearbook. Perhaps a few proof copies were made, but the main order was never produced as the school was destroyed?

[(Anonymous)]

So she missed the photo shoot deadline. Big deal. And I got voted "Most likely to rule the world" in my highschool yearbook. I sell mutual funds out of Tampa now... Gee, maybe there's a conspiracy there too!

This is highschool, hello?!