About a month into the second semester of my eighth grade speech class (in 1968), our teacher Mrs. Powrie had a heart attack and sat out the rest of the year. She was an older woman who ran the class pretty old school with lectures punctuated by our occasional speeches or other presentations. Pretty standard stuff if I remember correctly, and I really don’t remember much of the content of her class. I do remember her though, because a couple months previous my friend Carl and I were throwing snowballs at cars and hit one that turned out to be hers. Her husband stopped, got out and chewed us out while she glared at us from the passenger seat. I was all bundled up in my snow gear so I’m not even sure she connected this vandal with the kid in her class.

Anyway, all that just sets the stage for her replacement, a thirty-something man named Michael who would turn out to be a significant player in the next ten years of my life and its current ongoing trajectory. Where Mrs. Powrie had us giving individual speeches, Michael immediately put us into groups of four or five and told each group to pick a scene from a play to perform. Continue reading →