Friday, October 15, 2004
My wife's bellydance troupe, Unity in Motion, has decided to change their name. Without going into it, there are legal reasons for doing so, so Melissa, the troupe's leader, foolishly suggested that anybody who had any ideas for new names should think about it.
So Jan and I did. Heh heh heh...
So far we have about 26 names and some could actually work.
However, from the "NO CHANCE IN HELL" list, I have a couple of favorites:
Jan's Idea: The Nefertitties
Also Jan's idea: Masmoudi Blues
My Idea: Sgt. Dumbek's Lonely Hearts Club Belly Dance Troupe
We have some legitimate ones, too. We'll have to see if they use one of them.
----------
Cards beat the Astros again. To quote Opus the penguin when faced with an unpleasant reality: No no no no no...
----------
Both of my sons are doing remarkably well in school.
This surprises me a little. Jan always did fantastic in school but I hated it. I know I have an IQ (so I'm told) of like, 80,000 or something, but I HATED school. Proudly got out with a 2.5 GPA. Oddly enough, that was good enough to put me in the upper third of my Graduating Class. I guess they didn't like school, either.
I also had no trouble being accepted by all the colleges I applied to. Both of them.
My favorite and least favorite teachers in High School were both English teachers. The demon spawn known to me as "Mrs. Tempe," was my ninth-grade English teacher. She HATED me. She had her reasons, although they were all her fault. I had had her in eighth grade for Latin (yes, you used to be able to take Latin in Junior high). I didn't mind the Latin so much (I got a C! I'm so proud) as much as I couldn't abide by the fact that this woman had NO SENSE OF HUMOR. She didn't find jokes to be funny. At all. Not puns. Not one-liners, nothing.
So of course, I went out of my way to be hilarious. People would virtually fasten their seatbelts whenever she asked me about something or whenever I had to get up and give a speech in class. She HATED me. I hated her. So I quit taking Latin.
Imagine my surprise when I walk into my English class the first day of ninth grade and discover my teacher is: you guessed it, Mrs. Tempe.
I will never forget the first words out of her mouth when we locked killer stares at each other:
"So, Mr. Tuerff, we meet again."
"I guess we do," I replied. "This isn't going to be easy."
"Nor for you," she hissed.
For the next nine months, I...drove...her...fucking...NUTS.
I won't go into everything but suffice to say that I may be the only person in history to tell a Helen Keller joke in the middle of an impromptu speech assignment that figured to be about 20% of my grade. I got a "D."
I can still see her sitting there, the class rolling on the floor, and she's back there with her straight-ass hair, cut into a hairspray helmet, peering down at her gradebook through horn-rims that she probably bought in high school in the 50s, before humor was invented, and scratching a huge "D" next to my name.
(It would take too long to type here but if you're curious, ask me some time how I got her to actually scream at me. It was the first time in my life when I realized that my powers could be used for evil.)
When we moved to Phoenix I told my folks that I would only go if they PROMISED not to move us to Tempe. This woman had made such a black mark on my soul that I didn't want to be reminded of it every waking moment.
And see? 30 years later I'm still talking about the bitch.
When I got here to Phoenix, I met the most wonderful English teacher of all time: Thelma Alderman. The very first English class I ever had here was with her and I made sure every other one I ever took was with her. She made me proud to speak English again. She had a sense of humor that never stopped. She "got" my jokes. She told even better ones--never dirty but sometimes they were simply amazing and complex. She liked humorous literature. She liked science fiction. She had Kurt Vonnegut books in her class that ANYONE could read, unlike the library at school who told me on no uncertain terms that they didn't have that "smut" in the library. (One man's smut is another man's masterpiece: Slaughterhouse Five and Mother Night were required reading in my tenth-grade English classes in Wisconsin; as was Hesse's Siddhartha, which, as you might imagine, was not available at the Paradise Valley HS library, either. But Mrs. Alderman had them all.)
She let me help write -- and even GRADE -- her Advanced Placement English class's papers. I spent almost as much time in her classroom as I did on important stuff, like drama.
I was never sure how old Thelma was because A) She smoked, which aged her a lot; B) She was eternally tan, and wrinkled like you wouldn't believe, so she looked well into her 60s but I don't think she was that old; C) She was remarkably hip for an "old" woman.
She met my dad somewhere about five years after I had her in High School and she still remembered me. Is that cool or what?
All Mrs. Tempe ever liked was seeing my ass leave the classroom.
I can only HOPE Mrs. Tempe remembers me. I hope I haunt her dreams: "I won't leave you alooooooone until you laaaaaaaaauuuuugh... BOOOOOOOOO!"
TT
So Jan and I did. Heh heh heh...
So far we have about 26 names and some could actually work.
However, from the "NO CHANCE IN HELL" list, I have a couple of favorites:
Jan's Idea: The Nefertitties
Also Jan's idea: Masmoudi Blues
My Idea: Sgt. Dumbek's Lonely Hearts Club Belly Dance Troupe
We have some legitimate ones, too. We'll have to see if they use one of them.
----------
Cards beat the Astros again. To quote Opus the penguin when faced with an unpleasant reality: No no no no no...
----------
Both of my sons are doing remarkably well in school.
This surprises me a little. Jan always did fantastic in school but I hated it. I know I have an IQ (so I'm told) of like, 80,000 or something, but I HATED school. Proudly got out with a 2.5 GPA. Oddly enough, that was good enough to put me in the upper third of my Graduating Class. I guess they didn't like school, either.
I also had no trouble being accepted by all the colleges I applied to. Both of them.
My favorite and least favorite teachers in High School were both English teachers. The demon spawn known to me as "Mrs. Tempe," was my ninth-grade English teacher. She HATED me. She had her reasons, although they were all her fault. I had had her in eighth grade for Latin (yes, you used to be able to take Latin in Junior high). I didn't mind the Latin so much (I got a C! I'm so proud) as much as I couldn't abide by the fact that this woman had NO SENSE OF HUMOR. She didn't find jokes to be funny. At all. Not puns. Not one-liners, nothing.
So of course, I went out of my way to be hilarious. People would virtually fasten their seatbelts whenever she asked me about something or whenever I had to get up and give a speech in class. She HATED me. I hated her. So I quit taking Latin.
Imagine my surprise when I walk into my English class the first day of ninth grade and discover my teacher is: you guessed it, Mrs. Tempe.
I will never forget the first words out of her mouth when we locked killer stares at each other:
"So, Mr. Tuerff, we meet again."
"I guess we do," I replied. "This isn't going to be easy."
"Nor for you," she hissed.
For the next nine months, I...drove...her...fucking...NUTS.
I won't go into everything but suffice to say that I may be the only person in history to tell a Helen Keller joke in the middle of an impromptu speech assignment that figured to be about 20% of my grade. I got a "D."
I can still see her sitting there, the class rolling on the floor, and she's back there with her straight-ass hair, cut into a hairspray helmet, peering down at her gradebook through horn-rims that she probably bought in high school in the 50s, before humor was invented, and scratching a huge "D" next to my name.
(It would take too long to type here but if you're curious, ask me some time how I got her to actually scream at me. It was the first time in my life when I realized that my powers could be used for evil.)
When we moved to Phoenix I told my folks that I would only go if they PROMISED not to move us to Tempe. This woman had made such a black mark on my soul that I didn't want to be reminded of it every waking moment.
And see? 30 years later I'm still talking about the bitch.
When I got here to Phoenix, I met the most wonderful English teacher of all time: Thelma Alderman. The very first English class I ever had here was with her and I made sure every other one I ever took was with her. She made me proud to speak English again. She had a sense of humor that never stopped. She "got" my jokes. She told even better ones--never dirty but sometimes they were simply amazing and complex. She liked humorous literature. She liked science fiction. She had Kurt Vonnegut books in her class that ANYONE could read, unlike the library at school who told me on no uncertain terms that they didn't have that "smut" in the library. (One man's smut is another man's masterpiece: Slaughterhouse Five and Mother Night were required reading in my tenth-grade English classes in Wisconsin; as was Hesse's Siddhartha, which, as you might imagine, was not available at the Paradise Valley HS library, either. But Mrs. Alderman had them all.)
She let me help write -- and even GRADE -- her Advanced Placement English class's papers. I spent almost as much time in her classroom as I did on important stuff, like drama.
I was never sure how old Thelma was because A) She smoked, which aged her a lot; B) She was eternally tan, and wrinkled like you wouldn't believe, so she looked well into her 60s but I don't think she was that old; C) She was remarkably hip for an "old" woman.
She met my dad somewhere about five years after I had her in High School and she still remembered me. Is that cool or what?
All Mrs. Tempe ever liked was seeing my ass leave the classroom.
I can only HOPE Mrs. Tempe remembers me. I hope I haunt her dreams: "I won't leave you alooooooone until you laaaaaaaaauuuuugh... BOOOOOOOOO!"
TT
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