Rebellious Heights Childhood
The web-posted account, “The Queens of Montague Street,” by Heights native Nancy Rommelmann was excerpted and published by the Feb. 5 New York Times Magazine under the heading “Dazed and Confused.” In it, Rommelmann, who now lives in California, told of being “asked to leave” a progressive private school (Saint Ann’s not named) after consistently playing hooky.
Feeling she and her family didn’t fully belong, Rommelmann rebelled against the local elitism she perceived. “By 13,” she writes in the original account, “I’d had it with the tennis-club bulls__t, the moralizing Old Guard of the neighborhood who’d been there forever and made sure you knew it.” This was in the mid-1970s. She and a friend smoked cigarettes and pot, occasionally dropped acid, did petty shoplifting, and began hanging out with “boys from across the cultural divide, i.e. the south side of Atlantic Avenue, starting when three I’d never seen whistled at a school friend and me.”
The street life was only one side. Rommelmann and her girlfriend also baby-sat and went to art events in SoHo with the friend’s parents. They went to summer camp. Yet, as some of the street adventures turned ugly — she learned how brutal some boys could be to the girls and to gays — Rommleman’s behavior and acquaintances helped lead to a split between her parents, both of whom she was fond of.