In high school, my homeroom teacher was a Math Teacher named Mr. Hester. During my 11th grade “wild” period, I would come to school with a different hairstyle every day (wayyyy before black girls started doing it!). I would get up an hour early to use an entire can of mousse and hairspray to get my naturally curly hair to do abnormal things.

The first person to see these creations every day was my homeroom teacher. He would never fail to make a comment, and looking back on it, he was quite funny.

One day, he said my hair looked like someone threw a cherry bomb in it.

Once, when I had it all slicked back, I decided to put some grey make-up on the sides to look like temple greying. Hester told me that it looked like a bird had taken a dump in my hair.

I had another teacher that couldn’t look you in the eyes, she would always look over your head, so I gave her something to look at.

Once, I had some brown yarn left over from making a Boy George wig, so I crocheted (sp?) about 5 pieces of it into short (8 inch) strands, and tied them to a loop of yarn that I put around my head. So these pieces just kind of hung down from underneath my own hair. If I had known about weaves and tracks then, they would have seen a totally different me. What’s funny is that people actually remember that! They ask about it, and I thought it was just something to do.

One of my former best friends said that that was the day she first saw me in school. She told me that she said to herself that she had to find out who I was. (She was “crazy”, too)

My U.S. history teacher just looked at my hair sometimes and laughed. In her class, the person that sat directly in front of me was Janine Lackey. She used a can of hairspray every morning as well. One time, I had my head down on my desk (with big poofy hair) and she leaned her head back and our hair stuck together! We both failed that class. BUT, we both hated the teacher. (by the way, I aced it under a different teacher-me-in summer school)

I took it all in stride.

In high school, I took a French 2 class in the 12th grade. The teacher was from Argentina, I think. How the connection (and why she was in small-town Rocky Mount, NC), I will never know. She let us do a show and tell every friday, but it had to be presented in French. I looked at this as my entertaining possibility. The first week, I brought my Michael Jackson doll and one of my sister’s Barbies in and re-created the video for “The Way You Make Me Feel” (wayyyy before youtube was even thought about). Of course, I sang along while playing with the dolls.

My Arte Dé Triumph (see how much I got out of class? LOL) was the week I found hair mousse at Big Lots-it came in 2 scents-chocolate and strawberry. I bought one of each. So, they were pink and brown.

I did a short introduction in French about abstract and performance art, then whipped (no pun intended) out the cans and started spraying them on the platform in front of me. I made a sculpture out of the entire cans.

Looking back, I can understand why those products did not sell well. Can you imaging smelling that all the time?

The only reason I passed French 2 was the Show And Tell-I usually made the highest grade. (and entertained the masses) I used the rest of class time to write poetry and daydream.

How I wish I had videotaped most of the stuff I did. How lucky this generation is to have digital memories so easily saved!

I saw this and had to share… It’s Lady Gaga’s Telephone with our military guys acting it out. This borders on “don’t ask/don’t tell”. LOL
Click to view on Youtube

In 2006, I was given a VIP tour of Parrot Jungle in Miami (now it’s called Jungle Island). I got to get in the cage with a Komodo Dragon, a private viewing of a weird Australian bird, and feeding of the twin orangutans. During the tour, the people in charge saw that the animals were very comfortable with me, and the twins took to me instantly. After the tour, they asked if I would be willing to work with the “girls” (as they called them).

I agreed and on Mondays, I made the trek from Fort Lauderdale to Miami to be enclosed in the cage with the girls to provide mental stimulation and to assist in taking care of them. For a few months, I was part of the exhibit.

One of the women I worked with, Jennie, was from France and she was totally the monkey/ape mother. She would take the monkeys and apes home with her at night so they would not be alone.

She and I would sometimes take the girls around the park after all the visitors left in a little red wagon and they would play on the playground.

Like I did with my sister when she was a child, I was able to create some toys from what they had and the girls loved it. One example-they had a children’s toy car (big enough for one of them to get in) and I tied it to the top of the cage so that it looked like it was flying and they would fight to get in the car. I guess they were starved for something new.

When coming in on Mondays, I would feed the Parrots and walk around the park visiting with the Liger (Lion/Tiger mix).

This was the realization of a lifelong dream of mine. Yes, I was one of those people who wanted a monkey.

I wouldn’t change that time with them-it was a magical time.