{"id":899,"date":"2005-04-14T12:27:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-14T16:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/archives\/899"},"modified":"2005-04-14T12:27:00","modified_gmt":"2005-04-14T16:27:00","slug":"weird-things-i-did-in-high-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/archives\/899","title":{"rendered":"Weird Things I Did in High School"},"content":{"rendered":"

I look back on high school sometimes, and I cannot believe the stainless steel balls I had. Not only was I a huge nerd, socially dead to everyone but my fellow beloved band geeks (and yearbook staff! thanks, !) until grade 12 (when evereyone started to normalize with the expectation of graduating and moving the hell on with their lives), but I did *lots* of publicly humiliating things. <\/p>\n

I participated in the fundraising venture known as ‘Valet for a Day’ (previously called ‘Slave for a Day’, before my high school went politically correct) and wore wig, grass skirt, tank top covered in whip cream, dog collar, very badly applied makeup and carried a football around in my mouth while walking behind my “master” from first to fifth period. The “cool kids” actually pooled their allowances to buy me, thus the humiliating degradation. And yes, there’s a yearbook photo of me in this get-up. But I did raise a lot of cash for charity!<\/p>\n

I performed the role of Lady Olivia in Shakespeare’s play ‘Twelfth Night’, wearing a tight leopard-print dress with handcuffs stuffed down my cleavage (There’s a videotape of this out there somewhere. Scary)<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I did a memorized recital of Maya Angelou’s freaking long poem “On the Pulse of Morning”<\/a> in front of the whole school during a coffee house-style assembly.<\/p>\n

And the worst thing I did, which I only remembered this morning while pouring myself coffee in the office kitchenette, was dressing up in a diaper and going onstage with my friends Seth and Alyssa (also in diapers) to perform a 1937 Broadway musical song called ‘Triplets’, written by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz for their musical ‘Between the Devil’. A DIAPER. I’d been listening to a lot of Mandy Patinkin, and he had a recording of it on a CD I owned, so I somehow persuaded my buddies to do this with me. On stage. Before the whole school. I vaguely recall wanting to throw up before we performed, but getting through it anyhow. Some of the lyrics still haunt me: <\/p>\n

“We do everything alike \/ We look alike \/ We walk alike we talk alike we think alike \/ And what is more \/ We hate each other very much \/ We hate our folks \/ We’re sick of jokes \/ And what an art \/ It is to tell us apart! When one of us gets the measels \/ The other one gets the measels \/ Then all of us gets the measels \/ And mumps! And pox! And croup! \/ How I wish I had a gun \/ A little gun \/ It would be nice to shoot the other two \/ And be only one!”<\/i><\/p>\n

Yes, I did just type that out from memory. FROM MEMORY.<\/p>\n

High school. Weird stuff happened there, man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I look back on high school sometimes, and I cannot believe the stainless steel balls I had. Not only was I a huge nerd, socially dead to everyone but my fellow beloved band geeks (and yearbook staff! thanks, !) until grade 12 (when evereyone started to normalize with the expectation of graduating and moving the […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consciousness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}