Come Selahway With Me…

Oh, school. How I do not miss you. Don’t get me wrong, there were things I liked about it, but it took me a long time to realize that I liked school because I thought I was supposed to. It didn’t mean I actually did. I was just too much of a goody goody at the time to do anything different.

Partially I suffered various types of bullying as a kid, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to be perfect. There were good times: school musicals (before I took them too seriously), field trips, and English projects.

I will always be the grand high queen of the project, especially if it was English or literature. That was an area where I could easily go above and beyond, and I may admit to taking great relish in wiping the floor with my classmates, because it was one of the few areas I could actually beat them at anything. There was the time I bound my own children’s book (with jacket and illustrations, and it was YA novel length), the time I made pioneer food for the class and a hand-bound journal of a trip my group took in a covered wagon, the senior anthology project that ended up taking two volumes and was an exploration of the masks people wear to get through life (no I’m not making that up. I was pretty done with all attempts at a social life by the time I was seventeen), and then there was the time I brought a life-size dummy of a corpse to school..

Oh, the good old days when you could get away with things like that. This was also a senior project, for a speech segment. We had to do some sort of presentation and I think I did a speech from Shakespeare’s Cymbiline (as one does). Anyway, the character Imogen is mourning what she thinks is her husband (he’s beheaded, she can’t tell it isn’t him), and I got it in my head that I needed a dead body. My parents had this mannequin torso from a haunted house, so we put leggings and a tunic on him, stuffed the arms and legs and gave him glove hands, painted the neck, and I actually dragged that thing through the halls of school and never once got taken to the principal’s office/had the cops called on me/got expelled/got suspended/etc.

Actually, people considered it quirky behavior for me to drag a life-size dead body down the hall along with my giant backpack. It probably had something to do with the fact that he was floppy and dressed up in Shakespearean garb. Oh, the good old days. I don’t remember what I got on my speech (yes I do, I’m pretty sure it was an A), but I’m pretty sure I had more fun dragging that thing places and putting him in teacher’s chairs before the bell rang than I did actually doing the speech.

I know, I can’t believe people thought I was cute back then, either.

So in celebration of the good old days, let’s get to the contest!

In the comments, tell me your favorite school memory – it can be from any grade, good or bad. Also leave your email. I shall put it through the randomizer, and the winner will have their choice of my NBP titles in PDF form!

Be sure to check out the rest of the awesome people on this hop!