| Marcia Young, the giant penguin, and the exploding belly
Posted by Michael N. Marcus on April 3, 2008, 6:24 pm
My Latin 2 teacher at Hillhouse was Marcia Young. She was just a few years older than the kids in our class — but looked like she was 15 — and could be best described as unsophisticated, sheltered, virginal and naive -- in short, she was no match for 30 wise-ass suburban kids. We definitely didn’t dislike her; but she was such an easy victim, that she invited exploitation. Here are two of the Class of 64’s Greatest Hits: (1) Bob was a gawky giant of a kid, who could be persuaded to do weird stuff. One of the other kids (probably me) had a pair of swim fins in his gym bag, and we persuaded Bob to put them on while he sat in the back of the class. When Marcia called on him to go up the blackboard to write something in Latin, he waddled to the front of the room like a giant penguin. Bob kept a straight face. Marcia was terrified. The rest of us were hysterical. (2) Our Latin class started around 11:45, and was interrupted by lunch period. One day I happened to have an inflatable life preserver vest in my gym bag (I know it sounds weird, but I used the same bag for SCUBA diving classes after school). During lunch, Harry Eudowe and I went to the john and he put the deflated life vest on over his shirt, but under his sweater, and we went back to Latin class. We acted normal, and after a while Harry started moaning, and waved his hand frantically. Marcia asked what was the matter. Harry said he thought he had food poisoning. He told Marcia he had a terrible pain in his stomach. “It keeps going up and down and up and down and...” At that point, Harry sneakily pulled on the ripcord which punctured the gas cartridge to inflate the life vest, which made his torso seem to double in size. Marcia screamed. So did we.
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