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| A Purple Pirate is 100% more lame than a baseball player. Fact. |
The third grade teachers had us put on a play for the school about colors, I don't know why, but they did. I mean that the subject is more appropriate for kindergartners. So if we were not there to learn our colors, then was it to expand our skills in acting, song and dance?
Third graders hated kindergartners, would mock them and call them, 'kindergarten babies, born in the gravy'. If that insult seems nonsensical that is because it is. Enmity notwithstanding, the 3rd grade teachers put their heads together and decided that we should teach about the colors through the medium of big, beautiful, show-stopping, song and dance numbers.
They divided the kids into thematic color groups; blue baseball players, purple pirates, pink princesses, and five or six others. With limited places in each group there was fierce competition for the boys to play baseball players and the girls all wanted to be princesses. I had to be a stupid purple pirate.
After lunch every day the third grade classes would head down to the lunch/gym/stage room. There we would get yelled at for an hour as we tried to learn our songs and dances. I don't recall who was in charge of the project, but she wasn't one of the third grade teachers and she was fat and mean. She was from the motivate-through-insult school of musical theater. She demanded perfection and would belittle us out of concern for the quality of the show. In short, it was more about her than us.
Before one of these recitals I had spent my entire lunch break making place-mats out of yarn and not going pee as I should have. I was to the crotch pinching, pee-pee dance stage of bladder discomfort when the purple pirates were called upon to sing and dance. We were generally holding forth on the merits of the swashbuckling life and how that was deeply intertwined with the color purple. I was locking elbows in a 'do-si-do' with a fellow pirate and skipping in a circle when a little bit of pee came out. By 'little' I mean most of it. I decided the best course of action was to keep dancing like it was no big deal and hope no one noticed. That did not work.
My pants were quite obviously soaked in pee and it only took a second for one kid to notice and to yell to everyone else that I had peed my pants. All hell broke loose with kids laughing and teachers trying to maintain order and me exiting stage left to take the walk of shame to the office to call my mom. The office lady even made me sit on a towel while I waited. I vowed never to come back to school. I commitment I kept until the next day. I thought my life was over, but to my surprise no one said anything about it again, ever.
