I Wish I Was In College & The Choir Trip

          I found yet another reason to hate school – you have to stay there until June!  And because White Cedars had that blackout in October & all, we have to make up for the “snow days” that we used up during the days without electricity).  So while the towns around us get out in a less than two weeks, we have to go to school until almost the end of the month.  Yuck.

          I suppose it wouldn’t bother me, but Lizzie & Ronnie –oh, excuse me, it’s just plain Liz now—anyway, my cousins have been hanging around, using our house as a “crash pad” to sleep and hang out at after they spend an evening in NYC at a club of a play….

          And I’m jealous, because I used to be allowed to tag along, as long as my schoolwork was done to Aunt Lina’s liking.  But now I’m in Public School and I have to go, no matter how stupid it is.  Plus there’s play rehearsal – it’s gotten to the point where I forgot why the heck I even started with that in the first place!

          I’d really rather be with Ronnie & Liz, shopping in the Village or Williamsburg.  They’re even planning to go to Coney Island on the next sunny Tuesday.  I’m so unhappy that the bitchy side of me is glad that it’s been rainy.  I should be happy for them, but I’m so miserable in my White Cedars prison. 

          They told me about this new band they saw, at a “private invite birthday party” (Lizzie won tickets) at the Hard Rock for Little Steven (Van Zandt of Springsteen fame – I like his radio show), and about the pseudo-Biblical epic that some famous “drag legend” did at a small East Village theater.  They are having so much fun, while I’m stuck sitting at a desk re-learning stuff with a bunch of dullards.  Well, with a few exceptions, like Ruby, Dor, Amelia & Carl.  If it weren’t for our “crew” I’d be so lost!

          Aunt Lina knows how hard it’s been for me – we’ve talked about it, & she reminds me how I’ll have many years ahead of me for having the same kind of fun that my cousins are having now.  As old as she is, she must remember the weirdness of being a teenager, because she’s been so nice, especially when the cousins call to ask if they can sleep over.  One night a couple of weeks ago she even made her famous lobster Newburg when the supermarket had a sale on lobsters.  And she’s let me have first crack at the peas growing in the yard –I can’t believe how early they’ve begun to produce!  Sugar snap peas are so sweet and delicious – I want to put them in a salad, but somehow they just make it into my mouth.  You can eat them pod and all.  Later, when the crop gets bigger, I’ll shell them for dinner & fry up the pods in butter for lunch – yum.

          And there are some fun things going on at school.  Like the band and choir’s yearly trip.  It’s actually a competition between schools from all over the state, and White Cedars has such a good reputation for music that DSW competes against some High Schoolers!  They are mostly freshmen, but still!  Some of us Middle Schoolers are not quite teens!

          My first choir competition was very interesting.  We got up at 5a.m. to go to school, got on busses with teachers and parent chaperones, and set off for southern NJ.  Our band and choir performed in a school auditorium, in front of judges, and we were whisked out before the next busload of school kids came.  We never got to hear any of our competitors!  Instead, when all of the groups had performed (we have a jazz band, a learners band and the “green pride” band of more proficient musicians, as well as our chorus) The bus took us to the amusement park. 

          “Welcome to The NJ Adventure Park Experience” the huge sign over the gates proclaimed.  But reading that sign was all we could do for several hours (besides complain – there was a LOT of that going on!), because the grey storm clouds that had hung low in the sky all morning decided to let loose. Downpour! 

          By the time the storm had passed, we were sick of being on the bus (especially those in the back seats, near the bathroom).  Only a few of the rides and attractions were open, so people mostly huddled in souvenir shops, restaurants and food stands.  We didn’t get to ride on a roller coaster, and we didn’t have to ride on the splashdown to get wet. Good times. 

          Finally somebody with half a brain decided to give out the awards an hour earlier than scheduled.  We won second place for our band, and third for our choir, with a first place for our soloist from the 8^th grade.  He had a great voice.  Then we were back on the bus for our ride home.  I fell asleep on the return trip.  I wonder if I’ll go next year – this was nothing like Dor and Carl had said, but I guess it was mostly the weather that made it stink.  That and the over-used bus bathroom.

          Until my next post…..

          Randi

Mother’s Day Without A Mom

          It was Mother’s Day last month (I know, my postings are so far behind!), & I got cards for all of my friend’s moms, as well as a card for Aunt Lena.  Yes, Hallmark has a card for everything.  Unfortunately, I think that instead of making some women I like feel happy, I made them uncomfortable.  I’m happy that my friends have great moms.  I mean, some people I know have awful moms & my friends are fortunate.

          And I guess I didn’t think that Dor’s mom would cry when she got my card.  Carl said his mom got misty-eyed too.  Ruby’s mom called to thank me & we talked for a little – she wanted to make sure I was OK & I told her I was.  Mrs. R invited Aunt Lina and me to their family barbecue & she told me she felt bad for me, not having my mom around.  Then I felt awkward.   I guess I can’t miss what I never had, and Aunt Lina is the only “parent” I’ve ever known.

          Aunt Lina isn’t my “real” aunt – she’s my legal guardian.  No heavy blood connection, although tribe means family, the way I see it.  It was all set up legally as far as the US government was concerned.  The Seneca understanding is that Aunt Lina was chosen to raise me, and so they let her.

          Let me explain. You see, I don’t talk much about my mom, because it’s a biological situation.   My mother was a member of the Seneca Nation; she had been raped, and pregnancy was the result.

          I know, it sounds like one of those theoretical examples that pro-abortion people come up with as a reason to kill an embryo.  Well, I was an embryo, once.  My mother didn’t want to raise me, but realized that the Spirit had created me for a reason.  She gave me to the tribe. 

          Really.  My birth certificate lists my mother as “Jane D.” for Jane Doe, the name Americans give to unidentified females.  I was born on a reservation to a midwife who filled out the paperwork.  According to the official report, Jane D. gave birth in a home on the rez, and when the midwife had her back turned, Jane ran away.  According to Aunt Lina, this was the story the tribe gave out officially.  The real story was that my mother gave me up to the tribe, choosing Lina from the tribal elders to be my caregiver.  She felt that Lina would be able to convince me not to go looking for her when I was older. 

          She was right.  I’ve understood about sex since I was six, when I read a textbook about anatomy, physiology, and organ system functions.  I was eight when Aunt Lina fully explained about the rape and all.  This poor woman – according to Aunt Lina she wasn’t much more than a girl – had been violated once.  Why would I want to violate her again?

          Aunt Lina could have adopted me, called herself my mother and never let me know the truth at all.  But elders don’t do that.  The truth was the only way for Aunt Lina to handle things.

          Aunt Lina believes that the Spirits and the Saints were guiding my mother in her choice – my mother was not a shifter, although there may have been shifters in her family in the past.  Not much was known about the man who raped my mother.  Aunt Lina said that my mother refused to talk about the ordeal, and that she really did leave the reservation as soon as I was born.  Aunt Lina also explained that many people grow up not knowing much about their biological parents and that some choose to fill the void with people they know and love.  My aunt knows that I consider her as more than a mother – she’s my mentor, my friend, and my guide in the way of shifters.  Although she appears to be in her mid-to-late forties, I’ve seen evidence that Aunt Lina is much older than that.  I suppose that being a shifter gives her the ability to appear young(er).  Even when I was younger I knew…Aunt Lina sometimes let things slip – like she remembered when cars and telephones were new technology.  She says I’m lucky not to have to deal with the prejudices that were around when she was young.

          So we went over to Amelia’s and I had some delicious grilled burgers and Italian sausages.  I got to play with her younger siblings and met her older brother, Salvatore.  He’s a couple of years older than us, but goes to a private school, because he’s autistic or Asperger’s or something.  He told me that he used to go to school in town, but because he was “different” he’d been teased.  His nickname, “Sal” made for a lot of trouble, too – on the playground, he was called “Sally” and was accused of being gay.  One day he just turned around and punched his tormenter in the nose.  It turns out that his tormentor was Jack Green, whose dad is the mayor, as well as the best friend of Principal Knarf.  They expelled Sal for “excessive violence.”  A lawyer friend of their family told Mrs. R that she could go after the Greens and the school for allowing a “hate crime” to happen.  You see, even though Sal’s not gay, it’s still a hate crime to pick on someone for their perceived sexual orientation.  Way to turn the tables on the situation!

          Now Sal goes by bus to a school in another county, where he’s happy.  He’s a math whiz and he plays the saxophone.  He played some pieces for us; he’s quite talented.  Amelia doesn’t often talk about Sal, but I’d seen older kids at school tease her about having a “retarded” brother.  Sometimes she ignores it & sometimes she throws a put-down right back at the bully.   Funny thing is, Sal’s probably a lot smarter than the kids calling him retarded.

          Amelia says that when Sal was little he had difficulty communicating and sitting still.  Now he prefers to sit quietly and talk with adults rather than kids his own age.  He’s great with the little ones and they adore him.  He gave me an awkward hug when Aunt Lina and I left.  Aunt Lina thinks he may have a crush on me.  She also believes that the Spirits guide Sal, and he’s going to have an interesting life because of it.  She says he’s got a presence about him, more than just your average Joe with a guardian angel.  I kinda get what she means.

          We didn’t stay out too late at Amelia’s, because Aunt Lina wanted go up to Horseneck Sanctuary with me once the sun went down.  So we ran together, bear and cat.  Aunt Lina hasn’t been out too much lately, so when we shifted, she was very cub-like in her antics.  It was fun to see her rolling in the grass, and scratching her back against a tall rock.  Sometimes I forget that NJ is different for her too.

          She’s not shifted in a few weeks, because it’s mating season for bears.  She doesn’t want to leave her scent around for males to find.  Male bears travel far and wide searching for a mate in the spring – especially younger bears.  That’s why there are news articles every spring about bears being found in suburban areas, wandering where they really wouldn’t go, otherwise.  There had been a male tranquilized in Fallsview, which is two towns over, just last spring!  And last winter, a female had been found under the deck in a suburban backyard in Wayne!

          We had a few hours of fun, in the nature preserve.  We startled a few turkeys, and I even scented a pheasant, although she was hiding well.  There were geese in a field, and there were streams running down the rocky hills, making pools for the cricket frogs, toads and salamanders to lay eggs in.  Aunt Lina munched on skunk cabbage roots in her bear form – it’s a delicacy for bears, apparently.   

          All too soon we had to shift back and go home. I did have school on Monday, and needed my sleep.  As Aunt Lina and I walked back to the house, a passing cop car slowed down to check us out.  The patrolman rolled down his window and asked if everything was OK.

          “Everything’s fine, officer.  My niece is just having a little insomnia, so I figured we’d just take a little walk,” explained Aunt Lina.

          The car rolled on, and we got home a few minutes later, at 12:30.  And so Mother’s Day 2012 ended.  I hope that the moms who celebrated had a wonderful day.  And my hope for those whose path to motherhood was painful is blessed forgetfulness.  I don’t want my mother to remember me if it causes her pain.  I’m just blessed that she decided to have me at all.

          Until my next post…..

          Randi

A Student’s Lament (Aye Aye Aye!!)

          I can’t tell you how much I hate school!!!!

          I used to get up (or come in after a nice run in the woods), hit the books or computer, do a few assignments before breakfast, then finish the rest after I ate.  I’d be done before noon (sometimes before 10!), and have the rest of the day to read, listen to music, help with dinner, take a walk, watch a DVD, or nap, if I’d been out running that morning.  I didn’t mind keeping up with my studies in the summer, because Aunt Lina allowed me to pursue any topic I wanted until I felt I’d exhausted my interest. 

          That’s how my research on mummies morphed into learning about archeology, mythology and folktales of foreign lands.  My fascination with one shell I picked up on a visit to Wildwood, when I was seven, lead me to learning all about univalves, bivalves, mollusks, shore life and the importance of water systems.  Every time I found something interesting, I looked up more about it.

          Then the move to New Jersey and this go-to-public-school routine…

          Suddenly I have a full day, every day, with mandatory schedules that allow me no time to do things that really matter to my life!  I have idiot teachers that make reading, writing, and learning the most boring, time-sapping task.  They don’t like it when I already know the material, especially if I know more about it than they do. 

          Let me give you a prime example :The “Aye Aye” dynasty of Russia (as I like to call it).

          We were learning about Russia in Social Studies, and how there was “this revolution” as the teacher called it, where they took the Tsar out of power.  The teacher, Mrs. Raschall, talked about Tsar Nicholas, and asked the class a question about him.  Of course, no one’s hand went up.  So after twenty seconds, I raised mine and answered her question, referring to the Tsar as Nicholas Romanov.  The teacher said I was wrong.

          HUH??

          She said I was wrong because it was Nicholas “Aye Aye,” not Nicholas Romanov.  She even pointed it out in the book and had the nerve to ask me if I’d read my Social Studies book.  I swear this is true – ask anyone in my class.  Ruby did a face-palm gesture.  Carl was laughing so hard he had his elbow across his face, to make like he was coughing!  I tried to explain that Nicholas the second and Nicholas Romanov were the same guy.  She couldn’t believe it & asked me how I knew that.  After all, it wasn’t in the book. 

          Louise, one of the quietest girls in the grade, came to my defense.

          “Did you ever see the movie ‘Anastasia’?  It begins with the Russian Revolution!  And it’s all about the Romanov dynasty.”

          Mrs. Raschall still insisted on calling him Nicholas “Aye Aye”.  Thank God she teaches Social Studies and not Shakespeare!  Imagine learning about Richard “Aye Aye Aye”.  It’s a fine example of NJ tax dollars at work -- a teacher who is barely literate.

          It scares me --the cost-per-pupil in NJ is one of the highest in the country, and there will be kids graduating without the basic knowledge of how to pronounce Roman numerals after a name.  A kid like that could become your boss someday!  I’d sure hate to work for someone who was dumber than me!

          I told Aunt Lina about Mrs. Raschall and the “aye aye” incident, & she discussed it with a neighbor, Amy Coddington, whose daughter, Daphne, is a freshman at White Cedars High School. There was a similar problem at the High School last week. Apparently the stupidity isn’t only limited to teachers at the D.S.W. Middle School. 

          It seems that freshman students at WCHS have to take a class called Freshman Community Skills, where they learn basic internet proficiency, financial literacy, how to fill in a job application and how to research a given topic.  According to Daphne, the kids call the class “Freshskills” (because it sounds like Freshkills, a former NY trash dump, & the class, like the old dump, stinks!).  Well, the other day in “Freshskills” the teacher told the class that in less than 10 years, all of them would probably need to apply for some form of insurance. Her assignment was to use the computer to get some sort of insurance quote.  Sounds simple, right?

          Daphne decided to look into car insurance.  The problem was that she had no car (yet).  The teacher told her to pretend she was insuring her Dad’s car, go on the computer & get a quote.  Daphne hesitated.  They were asking for the type of information that the teacher, in an earlier lesson, had told them NOT to give out.  Like her date-of-birth….driver’s license number (which she didn’t have anyway)….phone number and address…..but an assignment is an assignment, so she went ahead, filling in a phony license number & birth date.  Apparently she wasn’t the only one who figured that such a tactic would fulfill the assignment.

          The result?  More than half the freshman class was getting phone calls and e-mails that night from insurance salespeople, who were thinking of them as possible clients!  Daphne was called twice after school, and once after dinner; she kept telling the guy that it had been a classroom assignment, but he didn’t believe her.  On the fourth attempt, Amy Coddington handed the phone to her husband, who cursed at the guy and hung up.   Stuff like this was going on all across town, because the teacher hadn’t fully thought out the consequences of her assignment.  And this teacher’s supposed to be showing kids how to avoid making stupid mistakes while using a computer, right?

          Why am I wasting my life trapped with idiots?

          That’s not to say that all teachers are idiots.  I was at a college graduation party this past weekend, where I met a young teacher named Zara who obviously cared deeply for her first graders.  She teaches in Connecticut, and talked about how she adores her class, even the most rambunctious of them, and how hard it was when she sees some kids struggle to understand the lessons.  It just makes her look at other ways of approaching the lesson, like using pennies to teach math.  But even she had a bad teacher story!

          She told some of the adults at the party (I just happened to listen in) about a student-teacher whose reason for becoming a teacher was simply to “have the same hours as my kids, and the same days off.”  It galled Zara that this woman seemed to think that papers graded themselves and lesson plans magically appeared from thin air!  And the student-teacher even called the regular classroom teacher, who was supposed to grade her efforts, and gave the real teacher an argument because she didn’t exactly write her a glowing recommendation!

          It’s sad that the bad teachers are so bad that they overshadow the good ones.  But it’s like that with everything, I suppose.  If something good happens, you may tell ten, twenty or even thirty people.  But if something bad happens, you’ll complain about it to everyone you meet, even strangers.

          Looking at what I’ve written, I guess that I’m a prime example of that!  I’ve just complained about 3 bad teachers, to the wide world of the interwebs.  But what else can be done? 

           Aunt Lina asked Zara what, if anything, she would recommend that she do as my guardian, because this teacher is obviously lees than qualified.  And Sara said that if my Social Studies teacher isn’t tenured (and she isn’t – it’s her first year), to tell the administrators or the board about her BEFORE she makes that tenured status.

          Otherwise, White Cedars will be stuck with this teacher until she decides to retire.  Yes, stuck with an educator who can’t pronounce Roman numerals properly.  But after all, it’s not as if she teaches Math or anything….

          Aye aye aye!!!!  (And I don’t mean three!)

          Until my next post…..

          Randi

Playing Catch-Up

          I have been so busy at school that April passed me by.  I didn’t get a chance to write about the unusual spring (everything bloomed so fast, because of the warm weather in March).  April seemed chilly, because March had been so warm.  And now May’s here.  School still sucks, the play’s still annoying, and we miss Carl so much.   The Madisons have become overbearing, and Wren’s become very sharp with those of us in the original afterschool group.  Mrs. R. is getting frustrated with bringing us to rehearsals where we just sit around and get yelled at for being “too loud”.  I mean, what are we supposed to do?  There was one practice that we never even did anything, but Wren insisted on us being there.  What a joke.  I think Mrs. R. was really ticked off because she’d finished her novel & had NOTHING to do but wait.  At least we kids had homework to do.
            April 15^th was Pascha.  I can eat meat again, and Dor’s no longer being teased at lunch.  The Tuesday after Pascha (she was off that Monday to go to church) Carl brought in a smallish layer cake, all chocolate with fudge frosting, which he’d made to celebrate Dor’s breaking of the fast.  She shared it with our group at lunch.  Carl had cleverly decorated it with M&Ms and Oreos.  Everyone in the cafeteria saw it, and some kids even asked for a slice. 

            Dor handled it magnificently.  Whenever anyone asked for a taste, she solemnly said that she couldn’t give them one, for “religious reasons.”  When Terri, from the popular girls group asked Dor what that meant, Dor opened her eyes all wide and innocent-like, and said “According to my beliefs, I can’t break bread with people I don’t trust.”

            Nina, who was standing behind Terri, said the most ridiculous thing after that.

            “But it’s not bread, it’s cake!”

            Yeah, it was classic.  It just goes to show how great an education she’s managing to get at D. S. Whitstone Middle School.  Now I know why snobby prep school kids in TV sitcoms ridicule public school.  Perhaps they have a point. 

For the rest of the day, if any of us met up in the hall, that was our greeting.  “But it’s not bread, it’s cake!”  The other kids looked at us as if we were crazy, but we’re used to that.

            The very last week of April we got our Easter Break.  Except they don’t call it Easter Break, like we did in PA.  They call it “Spring Break” as if we were in college.  I guess it’s another way my new home-state is trying to sanitize Christianity from its reality.  They did give us (Western) Good Friday off, but that’s probably only because the teacher’s union wouldn’t allow them to take a day off away from the workers!

            In the few days before “Spring Break”, the teachers seemed to have gone totally nuts.  It’s like they’ve suddenly realized that the end school close, and they have to step it up in order to get as much of the curriculum in as their original lesson plans said they would.  They began giving out assignments galore to do on our vacation.  We all planned to do some of the work together, and doing it at my house was preferred, because Aunt Lina was at home. 

          Ruby, Amelia and Carl all have Miss Joilee (remember her from testing?) for homeroom or “Language Arts” (which used to be known as Grammar and Literature in Pennsylvania).  They came by with Dor, on the first day of vacation, and Carl was complaining about an assignment he’d been given.

          “She says she wants us to be creative, but then when I am, she sucks all of the fun and creativity out of any assignment I write, with her damned purple pen.”

          “I know!” exclaimed Amelia, as she grabbed another cookie off of the platter Aunt Lina had set out.  “I hate that purple pen.  It’s made me hate reading my little brother’s favorite story to him anymore!”

          “Harold and the Purple Crayon is your brother’s favorite book?” asked Aunt Lina, looking up from her computer.  “I love the artwork!  I was sad when Randi grew tired of picture-books.  Some of the best American art is in picture-books.  Like the late Maurice Sendak, may he rest in peace.  I loved his illustrations ever since I read Chicken Soup With Rice. ”

          “I know,” said Dor, smiling.  “I still have this miniature set of Sendak’s…in a little box. It was my Mother’s, and she got it from my Godmother, Aunt Polly.  My favorite story is Pierre, the boy who would only say “NO!”

          “Mine too!” laughed Aunt Lina.

          We were all sitting in the kitchen, and Aunt Lina was on a stool at the counter, drinking tea and typing.  Usually she’s in her studio painting or crafting, but today she was playing the responsible adult, so she had on jeans without paint stains, and was at the computer, sometimes listening in our griping.

          “So what kind of assignments does this teacher give, Carl, and what does she consider “wrong” with your work?"

          "It’s not just my work that she finds wrong, it’s the fact that I’m a male.  I guess she thinks that boys can’t be as imaginative as girls.  I swear if a boy and a girl submitted the exact same essay, she’d automatically grade the boy lower!  And that makes it hard for me to even care about her assignments any more, if I can’t get a high grade anyway."

          “Well, that’s not nice!  I’m really surprised at how much school has changed since….well, since I went.  Is this an honors class? According to some of the mothers I’ve spoken to, taking an “honors” class means your child will not get an A because teachers can’t give A’s for honors classes.  It would boost a kid’s GPA too much. So even if a child is capable of earning a grade, they can’t earn it, because it won’t be given. Ridiculous, if true….ooh! My friend Tom Patrickson is a writer – you may have heard of him.  He’s online right now & I sort-of wrote to him about your teacher complaint, as we were talking…”

          “Whoa!” exclaimed Ruby, “You don’t mean the Thomas Patrickson, author of Shoot or Die, and Redskin in Red Square, do you?”

          “Yes, that’s Tom.”

          “Cool!” said Ruby. 

          “No way!” put in Carl.

          “Well, Tom’s kinda having writer’s block, and just told me he’d love to only have to worry about what some stupid teacher thought.  Why don’t we give him one of your assignments from Miss Joilee?  It could be amusing,” she said, clicking at the keys on her laptop.

          “You’re kidding, right?” asked Carl.  “Joilee hates guys – no male in any of her classed has ever gotten higher than a B-.  She’ll purple pen him!”

          “Then you will have proven your point, right?” asked Aunt Lina.  “This is a real life lesson, not a school lesson.  Think of it like a science lab.  How can you prove your theory to be right?  Let’s devise an experiment.  If Tom agrees, let him do two papers, of the same assignment.  Write one essay as a girl, and one as a boy.  Let’s see what the grade is.”

          Aunt Lena was typing furiously.  My friends and I were chuckling at the thought of fooling a teacher.  Aunt Lina hit one last key, then sat back and sighed.

          “Let’s see if he’ll do it.”

          We didn’t anticipate an immediate answer, and so we just kept on working on our homework.  We had expected to be practicing for the play, but Wren had sent us e-mails saying the practice time had changed from 3:30 to 7, and Mrs. Z. called to tell us that she would pick us all (except Carl) up after dinner for the late rehearsal.

          Then Aunt Lina let out a “Whoo-hoo” that made us all jump.

          “Tom’s up for it, guys!  He’ll do an essay for your teacher, just to see how he’d be graded.  I’ve got to e-mail him the info, and he’ll send me two essays.  He’s going to work on it tonight, and he’ll use different fonts and spacing on each assignment so it will look legit.  But you have to promise not to tell anyone.  If you do, he’ll deny any involvement.  Plus it makes me look bad.   Is that OK?”

          Of course, we all agreed.

          So Carl sat down at Aunt Lina’s computer & asked a NY Times bestselling author to help conduct an experiment….

          Dor and Ruby were helping Amelia with her math, and discussing the upcoming choir competition at a South Jersey amusement park. I hadn’t been involved in much of the group’s fundraising, and had been wondering if it was worth attending.

          “After we’re done singing, we have the rest of the day to go on the rides, and in the late afternoon, they announce the trophy winners.  It’s so cool; they’ve got the best coasters, and last year it was so hot that we went on the splashdown ride & were dry in less than a half-hour,” said Carl.

          “I want to go on Odin’s Thunderbolt.  It’s the biggest looping rollercoaster on the East Coast!” declared Ruby.

          The rest of the afternoon we goofed off in the backyard, listening to music.  We had an early dinner, after my friends left, because of the play rehearsal.  Mrs. R came by at 6:30. And we got to a local church basement (yes, another site for practice) in time to see everyone coming out of the building.  Was it a fire drill?

          No, we were informed rehearsal was OVER.

          Huh?

          Wren was even asking us why we had ignored her e-mail.

          First of all, let me tell you about that e-mail from Wren about rehearsal times changing.  Apparently, what she had meant to say was that rehearsal time had changed from the usual 4:00-to-6:00 time to a 3:30–to-7 rehearsal.  So when Mrs. R drove us over at 7, the rehearsal was ending!  And all because Wren had not used proper English, or taken the time to clarify her meaning,  or even read over her e-mail before hitting “send”.

          The funny thing is, the misunderstanding seemed limited to those of us from White Cedars.  All of us agreed that the e-mail was unclear.  Saying the time had “changed from 3:30 to 7” implied that rehearsal time used to be 3:30 but now was 7. Amelia’s mom, Aunt Lina and the other parents all agreed.  But Wren said (in her nasty little voice that meant she was right, and you were, obviously, stupid) that it should have been clear that the rehearsal, which usually started at 4, was changed to 3:30. 

          Except the non-stars weren’t always supposed to show up at 4!  We extras were always given different times to show up, so that Antonio, the director, could work with the singers & dancers separately. 

Mrs. R was livid when Wren treated her like an idiot for misreading her poorly composed e-mail.  She was so mad that she asked Wren if she understood the fundamentals of the English language.  How else could ALL of the White Cedars parents & kids understand her e-mail to mean the same thing …a three-and-a-half-hour change in the start of rehearsal?  Wren insisted her e-mail was perfectly clear, because all of her stars had shown up on time.  Mrs. R told us to get back in the car, and drove us home.  During the whole trip home, she kept saying that if we hadn’t invested several months of our time in this damn play, she’d pull Amelia out & advise everyone else to do the same.  She was so upset! 

          And as we were leaving, I noticed that Wren’s mouth was puckered up like she’d been sucking lemons.  This did not bode well….

          Needless to say, rehearsals have become very tense.  Wren is icily polite to Mrs. R.  And Mrs. R just laughs it off, throwing off comments about the lack of a proper education in Language Arts that some towns have….

          Once our Spring Vacation was over, we went back to DSW Middle school & handed in our assignments....both of Mr. Patrickson’s essays were different, and the guy really did try to think like a girl for one and like a boy for the other.  The experiment was a “success”-- Amelia got an A- and Carl got a C-.  It doesn’t help Carl improve his grade, but it proves that he’s right -- Ms. Joilee is prejudiced against boys. 

          Oh!  And Tom Patrickson asked Aunt Lina to mail him the graded essays.  It seems that our little deception gave him an idea for a non-fiction article, about the state of education in the US today…

          Carl told Aunt Lina that if Mr. Patrickson needed to ask questions of those of us “in the trenches” he’d be very willing to have a conversation on Skype.  Carl still can’t get over the fact that a best-selling author got a C- from Miss Joilee.

          Well, this post is longer than I intended & I still have so much to write about!

          Until my next post…

          Randi