One time in Mrs. Leatherwood’s second grade Gifted class, I had to create a commercial for a ficticious product. I invented Monster Marshmallows (“Marshmallows with a BITE!”) To create my marshmallows I bought a big bag of big marshmallows, dyed them with food coloring, and then created little accessories out of paper (eyes, horns, claws) to glue to them. The only problem with Monster Marshmallows was … they were delicious. By the time I was to perform my commercial, two-thirds of the monsters lie deep within my belly.
At some point during my time at Shedeck Elementary, we received a similar assignment. Now to be 100% honest, I don’t remember what it was I was supposed to advertise. All I remember is how I decided to do it. I decided to put on a puppet show with two main characters, an elderly couple. The problem was, I only had one good puppet, so here’s what I came up with: I would change the puppet’s costume throughout the show. With a wig and glasses on, it would become an old woman. Remove those two and add a hat, and the puppet would become an old man. This would be accentuated with my awesome voice changes as well.
I had built a little stage out of cardboard. For some reason I remember it being a wagon or a stagecoach, but I could be wrong about that. While I was hiding behind the cardboard giving my presentation, I could hear people laughing. What I didn’t realize was, I had started getting everything mixed up and started using the woman’s voice for the man and vice versa. To make matters worse, the more I moved the puppet around the more things kept falling off. Pretty soon the wig had fallen so far out of reach that I had to stop my show to walk around and fetch it. Halfway through the program, some of my classmates started doing their impersonations of my old lady voice.
I don’t remember what grade I got but I remember being extremely pissed about the whole deal.
Believe it or not, that’s not the worst school presenation I ever did. That honor goes to a speech I and two friends gave in ninth grade.
I’ve never been a fan of school group projects, mostly because I don’t like working with groups. On this particular project (a book report), we were put into groups of three and told that there would be a total of four grades: each of us would receive a grade based on what we did during the presentation, and the fourth grade would be an overall grade.
Patrick Morris (a fellow Gifted student and friend of mine) and some cowgirl named Stacy were in my group. I don’t remember if it was Patrick’s idea or mine, but this is what we came up with: I would write the report, Stacy would read it at home and record it into a tape recorder, and then during the presentation we would play it back and Patrick would lip-sync to Stacy’s voice. We all thought it was a pretty funny idea before hand.
I had the best part of the group; I got to read the book and write the report, something I didn’t mind doing at all. Once that I was done I printed it out and got it to Stacy, who did her part. She read the report verbatim and brought the print out to school so Patrick could read it while lip-synching, so his lips would match up with her voice.
Doesn’t this sound hilarious? Too bad it wasn’t. Not a single person laughed, partially because there was really no point to our little plan. Absolutely none. It made no sense. The only time people laughed was when you could hear Stacy’s mom yelling at Stacy’s brother on the tape. At another point, you could hear Stacy’s dog barking.
Sometimes you’re committed to a bad idea. We knew it was a bad idea ten seconds after starting it, and our report ran twelve minutes long. It was twelve of the longest minutes of my life, standing in front of the class with a red face waiting for that stupid speech to be over.