I was one of four girls acting as phone solicitors for the Fred Astaire Dance Studio, which was then located on the east side of Marion, a little south of Lake Street.
Vicki Davis, Sue Ensminger, a pretty girl named Laura and I worked for a couple of bucks an hour after school, allegedly calling numbers out of the phone book and informing people they had been chosen to receive free dance lessons. Of course, in order to get the free ones, you had to sign up for paid ones, but ?
Our “call center” was a revamped second-floor bathroom, equipped with four phones, and accessible only by a metal, spiral staircase. We loved that staircase, because we had ample warning that the boss was coming ?#34; clank, clank, clank, up the stairs in hard-soled shoes. So we rarely made calls until we heard the clanking. Or rather, we rarely made calls to people in the phone book (“Hello, I’m Miss Vincent from the Fred Astaire Dance Studio, and I’m delighted to let you know that ?). We made plenty of calls to our boyfriends. They got used to us moving into our spiel mid-sentence.
We amused ourselves in other ways, too. We exercised, we gave each other make-overs, and shared lots of gossip. It was a good experience in that we all came from different social groups at OPRF. Vicki was just about the most popular girl in my class, and the two other girls were a year older and spent time with bright kids their own age. Me? Oh, I drifted between whatever groups would have me. Sometimes it was the hippies, sometimes people in rock bands ?
None of us sold any dance lessons that I can remember. It took the proprietors a surprisingly long time to figure that out, but as soon as they did the books, we were out and the call center was probably turned back into a bathroom.
Where DID we go to the bathroom, anyway?