“I know you’re leaving, but are you still playing basketball this year?”
“Yes, I am playing. The B team,” I responded.
Such was our momentous first conversation. But I couldn’t get it, or her, out of my mind. Two weeks later, on a Saturday, I was taking the PSAT standardized test in our school library. When I turned in my test, I spotted the redheaded girl standing with some kids I knew.
I had recently made a guest appearance on Andy Griffith’s new CBS series, Headmaster, whose life span would prove to be even shorter than that of The Smith Family’s. Not that any of this mattered in the moment. What mattered is that I had another chance to engage with this girl.
I walked over and reintroduced myself. “I’m Ron,” I said.
“I’m Cheryl,” she said. “I saw you on Headmaster.”
We talked a little bit longer and I told her that I was worried about falling behind on homework because of my TV obligations. “If I get behind on my assignments, maybe I could call you and you could . . . uh, explain them or something?” I said, planting the seed like the smooth operator I wasn’t. She said that sounded good. But like an idiot, I forgot to ask for her number.
Cheryl, front-row redhead Cheryl, occupied my thoughts, all the time. At home, I looked her up in the yearbook and found out her last name: Alley. Then I checked the white pages of the phone book, looking for an Alley family in the Burroughs High School district. I found a listing for a Mr. Charles Alley on Evergreen Street in Burbank.
Then I . . . well, I guess I stalked Cheryl. Whenever I was done shooting The Smith Family, usually around three o’clock in the afternoon, I drove back and forth between her house on Evergreen Street and Burroughs, casing out the route that Cheryl most likely walked to and from school. I did this over and over again, hoping that I might somehow happen upon her in stride. I had it all planned out: I would roll down my window ever so casually and say, “Oh, hey, Cheryl, it’s Ron. Ron from Mrs. McBride’s class. Would you like a lift back to your place?”
It never worked. All I ended up doing was drive in a continuous, frustrating loop while James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” the song of that season, played seemingly nonstop on my VW Bug’s tinny radio.
Finally, in late October, I gave up the stalking and decided that I would just call the listed number. I stared at the phone for a long time, sweating like Bert Lahr. Then I picked it up and dialed. A man I presumed to be Mr. Charles Alley himself answered. “May I speak with Cheryl?” I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling.
“Who should I say is calling?” the man asked.
“Ron Howard.”
Cheryl came to the phone. I bullshitted her about needing help with an assignment. We were reading Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities in class, and I claimed not to know what that night’s homework was. She told me which pages to read. Now it was time for me to put up or shut up.
“Thanks . . . and, um . . . Hey, would you want to go to a movie with me?”
“Yes,” Cheryl said, “but let me check with my dad.”
My heart pounded in my throat while I waited. She returned to the phone. “What movie would it be?” she said.
I told her that Stanley Kramer’s 1963 all-star comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was playing at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, and that I had seen it and loved it. I thought that she might like it, too.
Once again, Cheryl said that she needed to check with her dad. This prompted another short wait that somehow felt like it lasted an eternity. At last, she got back on the line.
“Okay,” she said.
Or should I say, Okay, she said!
I laid out my plan to Cheryl: I would pick her up, we would catch the Sunday matinee, I would take her to dinner at Barone’s Pizzeria in Toluca Lake, and then I would drive her home.