Out of My Hands: Seth Edward’s Senior Trip

“I guess every­one remem­bers his own senior trip as being the wildest, zani­est, most rip-roar­ing time ever unrecord­ed in his­to­ry.  Well, that goes for me too, only  I’m going to record it.  We set stan­dards for drunk­en­ness, for fool­ish­ness, and for plain old gross behav­ior that future class­es of Hard­esty High could­n’t equal if their lives depend­ed on it.  Too bad they won’t get the chance.”

Fol­low Seth Edwards as the observes and par­tic­i­pates in the  wild and rau­cous adven­tures of a group of high school seniors leav­ing the con­fines of a small Mid­west­ern town and head­ing for the bright lights of the 1984 New Orleans World’s Fair, the swirling sands of Day­tona Beach and the rela­tion­al mine­fields of all points in between.

Author’s note:

I nev­er went on a senior trip.  I moved from Philadel­phia to St. Louis after my junior year, and I’m not sure if my new high school even had one.  I wouldn’t have known any­body on it any­way.  I did, how­ev­er, chap­er­one one senior trip dur­ing my teach­ing career, and that trip served as the inspi­ra­tion for this project.  (The cov­er pho­to and itin­er­ary are a direct lift.)  My group was not as rau­cous as Seth’s was, but I was amazed at the obses­sive fix­a­tion on con­sum­ing alco­hol that per­me­at­ed the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness of those small-town Mis­souri kids.

This was the sec­ond book I completed—my first project after hav­ing writ­ten The Whole Nine Yards (a fic­tion­al­ized rem­i­nis­cence about my own high school days) which Dell Pub­lish­ing Com­pa­ny sub­se­quent­ly bought.  When I sub­mit­ted Out of My Hands to my edi­tor at Dell, he had some admir­ing words for it but said that they couldn’t pos­si­ble con­sid­er pub­lish­ing it because it was too row­dy to ever get pur­chased by a pub­lic school library.  It seems kind of tame to me now.

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