CSotD: A little locker bay humor
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And you thought Richard Thompson only dredged up long-suppressed memories of pre-school!
Today's Cul-de-Sac explores the last day of big-kid school by bringing back tortured memories of the locker bay, with comicdom's favorite neurotic kid epitomizing the neurotic kid we all become when we think too hard about lockers. It's a salute to Petey's limited savoire faire that he's only a witness this time around.
The good thing about the locker bay was that (once you were considerably older than Petey) you could make out for a few minutes behind the end of the row of lockers where Mrs. Climenson couldn't see you. But this was only relevant to my own life for about six weeks during Senior Year, and, the rest of the time, the couples back there were just one more thing in the way while I was trying to get my stuff and go home.
Mrs. Climenson was the business teacher, and her room was opposite the locker bay. She not only policed our morals there but was the person you went to if you forgot your combination. She would look it up, but her annoyance over a kid forgetting his combination and her annoyance over two kids forming a combination were indistinguishable and you really didn't want to have to go to Mrs. Climenson and ask her to look up your combination.
As a consequence, I only rarely have "The Student Dream" in which I have to take the final for a class I've never been to.
No, I have "The Locker Dream" in which it is the last day of school and I've been using a bootleg vacant locker since about October because I have long since forgotten my combination. But now it's time to clean out our lockers and I know that mine is full of stuff I need and books that have to be returned, only I can't get into it and am not 100% sure anymore where it even is.
And I'm sure as hell not going to ask Mrs. Climenson, because it's one thing to ask her to look up a combination and quite another to let her know that you've gone for the last half of the school year without even knowing your locker number.
And you wonder why Petey Otterloop is one of my favorite comic characters.
Here's another tidbit about education experts, by the way: We had real lockers. That is, you could put in a winter coat with a hat and gloves, stow a pair of boots in the bottom and still have room for your text books. But shortly after we graduated in the Sixties, the geniuses who decide these things found that giving kids enough space for their stuff added square footage to the building, and, since the kids don't have a mechanism to lobby for their own needs in these things, lockers have since become about half the size of the old ones.
This was a great thing for cartoonists because, once kids no longer had a place where their books would fit, it meant that, on the days when cartoonists can't think of anything funny, they can draw cartoons about students toting around giant backpacks.
Of course, I'm not sure those new, 40-pound history books I mentioned yesterday would have fit even in our larger, full-length lockers.
I still have the Locker Dream from time to time, but I almost never have the Student Dream. Maybe that's because you can bullshit your way through the final for a course you never showed up for, but you can't bullshit your way past a Master lock.
Well, I couldn't. But there was a way past going to Mrs. Climenson, if you could find Harold Pickering, who had a talent for cracking Master lock combinations. It's a good thing for the world that Harold was a very honest person, because it was actually quicker to have him open your locker than to go get the combination from Mrs. Climenson. And you got to skip the lecture.
Oddly enough — given that my time on the boards is limited to my Senior Play in high school and one minor play in college — I used to have the Actors Dream, in which it is opening night for a play in which you have a major role but for which you have never been to rehearsal. The thing that makes the Actors Dream truly great is that, not only are you about to go out on stage and make a total ass of yourself, but that, unlike the Student Dream where it's your own funeral, in this version, there are a great many people backstage who are quite justifiably annoyed with you, too.
I stopped having the Actors Dream after one night in which, after agonizing over the impending disaster, I got up the nerve to ask a fellow thespian what the play was. And he started by saying, "It might have helped if you'd shown up for rehearsal a few times," but then gave me the name of a play that I had never heard of. "What's it about?" I asked, and, with a great deal more irritation, he snapped, "It's a Chekhov!" as if that was all I needed to know to fake my way through it.
I actually laughed myself awake and had banished the Actors Dream for all time. Drama people get annoyed when I suggest that "It's a Chekhov!" is a funny punchline to the dream, and sometimes try to argue about how different the talky, indolent Russians are in each of his various works, but it did the job for me.
As for the Student Dream, I may have nipped that one in the bud my senior year in college, when I had a seminar on the third floor of the administration building, a long trudge up to a kind of dark, dank room. I skipped the second meeting, and, when I showed up for the third, I found myself alone in an empty room. Apparently, they had changed locations in my absence.
So I said to hell with it, dropped out of school and moved to Boulder.
Okay, I'm probably not that much like Petey after all. That's much more of an Alice solution.
(BTW, Friday was the final deadline for Team Cul de Sac contributions. If you haven't checked in lately, you need to go here and catch up!)
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