“I’m going to take you in the back room, hide your clothes, and beat you with your shoes.”
“Okay folks, lets get started warming up.”
That’s me, directing my high school choir class when I was a senior in high school. I’m leaning over the black upright piano trying to conduct a scale with my right hand while playing along with my left, because if I don’t, who knows how sharp we’ll go.
“Again, but please try to wake up and at least attempt to blend your vowels.”
On that particular morning, the new girl was being chatty with the other altos. At that point I really didn’t know much about her other than the fact that she had just moved during the summer, she had these arrestingly dark eyes that I was extremely interested in, and that she would not shut up.
“Much better.”
I like to pretend that I got to run choir class while the teacher was out because of my firm leadership skills and encyclopedic knowledge of singing, and also because my movie-star good looks helped me gain and keep the attention of all of the ultra pretty choir girls. Because seriously, that class had some ridiculous foxes in it. I’m pretty sure that it had to do with zero of those things, though. I try not to delve too deeply into that mystery – I loved any time I got to get up in front of people and do stuff in high school.
“Okay, now lets get out ‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’”
About five things are working against me when I finally decide to tell New Girl to, seriously, pipe down already. They are as follows:
- I am 17.
- New Girl is cute as a button, if it were a super sexy button with dark eyes.
- There are a dozen other people watching, of which I wasn’t necessarily conscious, but I think that impaired my decisionmaking.
- I was inside of a high school, most of which are monolith portals into a dimension beyond the reach of logic, reason, or good judgement.
This story has no “So, I thought to myself . . .” section, because it didn’t happen. There was no thinking involved in what I said, as I recall. So I just turned to New Girl, the cutest girl in my choir class, a person I subsequently dated for over three years, and, in the first statement I ever addressed to her, said:
“If you aren’t quiet, I’m going to take you in the back room, hide your clothes, and beat you with your shoes.”