3.01.2009

Too young to talk to skulls.

She looked like wrinkled Death
and dressed like Gandalf;
sounded like the Wicked Witch of the West
had been converted to Catholicism;
but that woman loved the hell outta me.

Most elementary school librarians
have some quirks about them, at least mine
didn't smell like fish sticks or cat food.
To this day I swear that if she'd been born sixty years sooner
she probably would've wanted my hand in marriage.
That's the only reason I can think of
to explain why she gave me the role of Hamlet
in the sixth-grade play she proposed to produce.
I had no acting ability and was too shy and awkward
to read aloud without mincing words or pausing mid-sentence
to un-jumble that confounded Elizabethan English.
To top it all off, the too-tall redhead who got the part of Ophelia
was my pre-pubescent female arch nemesis
who had hated me ever since I moved in on her teacher's pet turf
in the oh-so-competitive fourth-grade.

I never learned my lines, of course
and would butcher them quite masterfully while painfully
reading from the cheap pamphlet printed in faded purple ink
that the twenty-or-so of us held in our laps in a circle of chairs
in the library every Thursday afternoon for forty-five minutes.
More than anything it was an excuse for us
to get out of class, and I had no problem
being the scapegoat for the play's indefinite postponement
and eventual cancellation.

Freckle-faced Ophelia never failed to rub mismatched Hamlet's
alleged memory lapses and sheer laziness in his face.
She's happily married now to a man
who swept her off her feet in true fairytale fashion, God bless her.
They both probably sleep with pillows between their knees.

I don't lose any sleep over it.
Some people are just better at sticking to the script.
You can pick them out at an early age--
it's a trait and a fate that sticks with them.

And me? I'm still stalling, just getting out
of class here and there for a little while at a time.
It beats the alternative.

No comments: