Valentine

  Back at Crayton Elementary School, there was a tradition that every Valentine's Day we would pass out cards to students we liked.  Some kids also gave them to our teachers, but that didn't happen often.  This exercise was supposed to be fun.  The teachers would pass out those wretched candy hearts with sayings on them.  It was supposed to be candy, but they tasted more like chalk.

 Every kid had a small box on their desk with a slot to put the cards into the box.  The girls would come around and put their cards in the boys' boxes, and then the boys would put their cards in the girls' boxes.  The key to both of these groups doing this was that the boys had to close their eyes, when the girls passed out their cards and vice versa.  You weren't supposed to see who had put a card in your box until you opened it.

 When it came time to open the boxes, some kids had a lot of cards, while other kids might have had only a few or maybe just one.  That is what happened to me.  I wasn't one of the studly boys in class that all of the girls liked. Some girls weren't the prettiest in the class, so they might have gotten a few or maybe one.  It was basically a popularity contest.  The other kids saw me as not being very athletic or handsome, so I guess that's why my box wasn't brimming over with cards like some other kids.  They also saw me as being the smart kid in class, since I wore glasses.  

 So, one year, it was obvious that the teachers had talked to one another about the disproportionate way that some kids got more than others, because the teachers required that the girls would give one card to each boy, and the boys would give one card to each girl.  We all knew why.  At least, it made those of us that didn't get many cards to feel good.  The teachers took the status kids out of the equation.  It didn't mean that the popular kids liked us any better by giving us cards.  It just meant that the teachers made them do it.  No love lost between us and them.  The teachers took pity on us unpopular kids.  Even though we all got cards, we were still picked last for games by the other kids.  They wanted to make sure we knew our place.  We did. 

April

  My mother had a great sense of humor.  She loved Monty Python and George Carlin, until he started getting dirty.  Much of her humor was imparted on me.  It was our way of getting through our days.  I would sit in my highchair and read funny books to her, while she was cooking.  I should point out that they kept my highchair after I had outgrown it, but I could still fit into it. 

 People, who knew my mother, didn't know that she liked to play practical jokes on us for April Fool's Day.  For me, it was always the same thing...she would wake me up announcing that it was snowing outside.  I would get excited and look outside to see it was a bright sunny day.  So, I would have school that day.  She would laugh, but I would be disappointed.  As time went on, that day would come, and she would say it was snowing.  I would humor her by looking outside to see a sunny day.  She and I would laugh, and I would go to school.

 When I got to high school, her waking me up on April 1st to say it was snowing was getting rather tedious.  When I was young, it was funny, but now not so much.  That day came, and she woke me up to say it was snowing.  I didn't want to play along anymore, so I said "Yeah, right" and tried to go back to sleep.  "No, really, it's snowing", she said.  After a little back and forth, I finally broke and looked out the window just to get this over with.  To my shock, it really was snowing.  There would be no school.  She laughed at my doubting her.  Never doubt what your mother says, even though you think there is no way it could snow on April 1st.  It did.

 

Shop

  I wasn't a very good student in junior high (middle school).  I couldn't really concentrate, since I was getting beat up all the time.  At least, that was my excuse.  I've already written about how much I hated gym class, but there is another one I hated almost as much:  Shop Class.

 The boys would take Shop, while the girls took Home Economics.  The first semester of Shop required the boys to plane and smooth a block of wood and then take it to the lathe to turn the block of wood into something useful.  Some would make baseball bats, while others would make legs for a small chair.  So, to start off, you put your block of wood in a vise and started planing.  The plane was pretty heavy, and the wood had bark all over it.  I just couldn't get the plane to smooth the wood.  When I would get to the end of the block, the plane would go down instead of up.  It was the plane's fault.  The end of the block had to have square corners.  Mine were round.  I went through several blocks.  Once someone had squared off the ends, they were to saw off the edges to make them straight.  I never got to sawing.  Mr. Sease was an ex-military man, who may have had high blood pressure.  I know that I would see his face get beet-red, when he saw me just planing away.  By the end of the semester, I hadn't sawed much less lathed.  The school lost a lot of money from blocks they bought, and I had planed.  

 The second semester was Mechanical Drawing.  I thought this would be easier than Shop.  It involved sitting at a desk and using instruments to figure out degrees and measurements to create a house on paper.  Since my father had studied architecture at Clemson, I thought this would be easy for me.  For some reason, I was always 1/16th of an inch off in my drawings.  Our teacher wasn't pleased.  My lines were straight.  My angles were good, but I was always 1/16th of an inch off.  I'm sure it was the ruler's fault.  

 I failed both semesters. My father wasn't pleased, because he knew I would never follow in his footsteps with architecture. I can say that I have never used a plane to smooth wood since, nor have I had to measure something within 1/16th of an inch.  I have built stuff, including stage scenery, but nothing that precise.  Almost but not quite.  The story of my life.  I guess that is why I am a perfectionist today.  A teachable moment from school.

Covenant

  When I graduated from seminary, I was the first person to basically have a major in Religious Drama.  At that time, there were only four of us in the Southern Baptist Convention that did religious drama as monologists exclusively.  We were all very good at what we did.  That is not an ego thing.  That is just the truth.  The word was out around the convention that we were marketable.  People wanted us.

 One day, I got a call from a drama group called the Covenant Players.  They were a travelling Christian drama group, and they wanted me to join.  They did their own scripts, and I had been writing scripts for some time.  The problem was how would one get paid?  Their answer was that the group would take up an offering in a church to pay for their motel and food.  However, if they didn't get enough money for the essentials, they would sleep in their van.  That didn't sound very appealing to me.  After all, I was this great religious dramatist.  It sounded to me like a hippie commune sort of thing.  I knew about hippie communes, because I used to be a hippie.  If there wasn't going to be a guaranteed salary, I didn't want to do it.

 I was nice and thanked them for thinking of me.  The Covenant Players are still around, although their main work is on the West Coast.  If you get a chance to see them, you should.  And, give them a couple of dollars to buy food and maybe a motel room or two.