The intermediate range

There is an intermediate range between the child who is perceived to have no special talent, and the child whose talent is such that it must be brought to the attention of a wider public. In that range I found myself, full of potential in my own eyes and in the eyes of some of the adults responsible for getting me through high school. No extraordinary efforts had been required of me. I knew no foreign languages, played no instruments, had not gone beyond calculus, had never written anything publication-worthy. But the multiple-choice game of the SAT test (actually the PSAT, and then the SAT) opened the door to higher education to me in a way no positive effort did or would have done: by virtue of my percentile ranking (which depended, obviously, on the population of willing test-takers I was one member of) I became a "National Merit Scholar." The cash award associated with that quasi-achievement was on the order of a thousand dollars, but I discovered in the process of applying for financial aid at Johnston (my parents having no more than a few hundred dollars saved for the education of any of their six children) the pleasures of "leverage": the thousand dollar scholarship translated into a full board and tuition grant at Johnston for my first year there, a multiplier of about five on the original award. The door was opened for me to a kind of experience I'd never imagined as anything but cinema.