Fountain Valley High School is ONE STEP BEYOND…

by Steve Bringe

Call me a cad. Call me a louse. Call me a jerk. Just call me, baby baby…

And that’s the crux of getting my way, the para-nepotistic journey that began with some polite romantic arm-twisting and finished with the Fountain Valley High School 1988 yearbook’s theme being ONE STEP BEYOND…

This isn’t some accident, this isn’t some parallel that just happens to reference MADNESS only in name and not in spirit. No, the yearbook theme is most definitely based entirely upon the seminal MADNESS song ONE STEP BEYOND…

Here’s how it happened, and like everything, it’s a story about a boy and a girl. The boy was me. The girl was… I don’t remember her name (call me cad, call me… et cetera). The boy was a huge fan of Madness. The girl was on the yearbook staff. The boy happened to be dating the girl when the theme for our senior yearbook was being decided upon. A bug in her ear, she wanting to please her boyfriend, and boom, MADNESS made it in! Here’s where you waggle your finger and say “For shame!” No more than two weeks later we were no longer dating, but by then it was too late. The project was well on its way and there was no looking back. The ONE STEP BEYOND… theme was many steps beyond by this point.

Want proof MADNESS was the inspiration? Take a look at this center spread:

That is my 7″ single of ONE STEP BEYOND… pictured within the yearbook’s pages. Those are Chas’ lyrics alongside. And there is MADNESS, printed straight through by name, ample evidence that I imposed my love for MADNESS upon my entire graduating class of 2000 plus fellow students.

So there’s the tale of how the 1988 yearbook for Fountain Valley High School in Orange County, California, USA, became a Testimony of Nuttiness. Pretty cool, don’t you think?