Where does it start?
With the new class starting, we’re talking about nostalgia and growing up and lots of little memories. I know that as a kid, I never thought my life would be like this. During my senior year, I had a scrapbook of sorts—one of those ones that you fill in rather than start from scratch—and it had a page of questions about where we thought we would be in ten years. I said I would be living in St. Louis or New York (knew I wanted to be city-bound…but I think I wanted a safety clause) and working as an actor or a writer. Which is funny, because I am neither of those things full time and yet both of things seemingly all the time.
Today I’m asking my students to start a conversation with one of their childhood memories, so I am here to lead by example. Growing up in the states, means we take classes in our state’s history, correct? I went to school in Kansas, so I can tell you that our state bird is the meadowlark, our state animal is the buffalo and we really, really tried to avoid picking sides in the Civil War. I can also tell you a lot about a woman called Carrie Nation. She was born in Kentucky but spent a great deal of her life in Medicine Lodge, Kansas (oh my goodness, do you not love funky names for towns? when I was six, I thought all the medicine in the world came from Medicine Lodge. But it is very small and could never hold that much ibuprofen, I tell you.) where she campaigned for prohibition. Like mega-campaigned. A woman on a mission. Big time. She carried a bible in one hand and a hatchet in the other, yet still had the means to throw rocks over the bars of saloons to save men from the drink.
We studied her for an entire week in the fourth grade, when my class then put on a Kansas Day assembly (which I can still remember falls on the 29th of January). Each member of the class was given an historical figure to portray, and some of us even had to prepare monologues to perform in front of the entire school. (Okay, so entire school meant fewer than 100 students, but as soon as you say entire school life becomes scary! That’s like every single person you know.)
And yes, I played Carrie Nation. Somewhere there is a photo of this, taken by Mrs Peterson (my favourite teacher in the entire world ever) and presented to me on the last day of school. It is a crazy picture that takes a ten year old and makes her look like this. My friend Jenny and I drew giant saloon doors on brown construction paper and taped them to the wall behind where I had to speak. At the end of my monologue, I ripped them with the hatchet. Oh, the drama of full school assembly! The first graders must have thought I had lost my entire mind.
So…if it is hard to pinpoint where this strange combination of acting, writing and education came to life…it may very well be Carrie Nation and Mrs Peterson.
Now please, to save me from my embarrassment: tell me a childhood memory I would never have known about you.
xlovesx
PS: Wikipedia says Carrie was nearly six feet tall. I don’t think we learned that in our Kansas History lessons, or I would never have been cast in such a role!
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