A very difficult situation: Part 2

So...where were we?

The last few weeks have been filled with an insane amount of activity:

• D2U classes have started;
• I took a radical approach to the first day by using performance in the classroom;
• I signed up for three committees (expected of all full-time professors at D2U);
• I volunteered to put on a Lunch-n-Learn seminar on “Performance and Pedagogy for College Professors”;
• I'm trying to keep up with my new teaching demands—four sections of Comp II and two sections of the Regents’ Exam Essay remedial class;
• I'm trying to get my book and book proposal started;
• I'm writing two articles for presentation at fall conferences;
• one of my favorite cats died;
• and I returned to counseling to work out some personal issues (it took a lot of courage to finally face these things).

And then, just when I thought I had enough to deal with...

In preparing for my first-day-of-class monologue, I knew I needed help. It’s been more than five years since last I auditioned for any kind of production, and my acting skills (though honed by four years of a well-respected actor training program in Atlanta) needed work. Sure, I’m a lot lighter on my feet than before, thanks to my days as a dancer and teacher…but my ability to do a good monologue needed some serious help.

So I called Martin*. Although I hadn’t seen him in five-and-a-half years, I thought it’d be very helpful if I could ask him to spend a couple hours with me working on the basics of my monologue. Sure, he's a complete doofus in many ways, but he's also a great acting coach. It was his teaching that helped me get the three or four professional roles I had before I stopped doing theatre.

I told Martin I'd pay him his usual fee, if he wanted, even though he owed me some money. Martin was happy to oblige me—albeit strangely hateful about my not having made an effort to see him in so long. But his rage, as it usually does, came and went, and I chalked it up to his being an eternal 12-year-old. We made arrangements to meet at his Atlanta studio space (which is housed inside the acting school where I trained) the Wednesday before my classes began. "Sure," he told me, "that'll be fine. And you don't have to pay me; I owe you $100 more, so maybe we can work an hour and I can take off $50." This arrangement was fine with me.

But I had this gut feeling: Don’t go see Martin. Call one of the drama profs at D2U and get him/her to help you. Do not go see Martin.

I couldn’t identify where that little voice in the back of my mind was coming from. Was it out of fear of driving in Atlanta traffic after three years away? Of being out on the interstate late at night? Hell, I used to make that 140-mile round trip six nights a week…nothing to be afraid of there. What was it that was urging me to call up the D2U people instead?

I ignored it, and started getting ready to meet with Martin. I got my lines memorized, and most of my visualizations down pat.


Wednesday evening arrived, and I got to the studio on time. We rehearsed for about 90 minutes, taking a break every 20 minutes or so, and the piece finally fell into place. It would certainly be different trying to pull off a crazy monolgue like that and make students believe that "little old me" was really this character, but Martin said he thought I could do it. "This looks a lot better than you think it does," he told me. "I think you'll be fine with it. And your students won't know what to do with themselves."

It was after 9pm when we finished, and I had to drive back home 90 minutes, get ready for bed, and be at D2U office at 8am sharp the next day for a meeting. "Thank you so much for your help, Martin, especially on such short notice," I said. "You're helping me inspire students to get motivated about literature."

"Glad I could help," he replied. "By the way—what are you gonna do if some of them walk out during your speech?"

"Oh, the hell with 'em," I chuckled. "I have overloads in every single class, so a couple fewer here and there will actually make me happy."

Even though I'd just stated that I had to leave, Martin insisted on showing me around the acting school's brand-new renovations, since I hadn't been there in so long. Since it was late, there were very few people around—the only rehearsals going on were in several rooms at the other end of the long hall. As he pointed out the rooms where he usually works, Martin began his usual litany of why he was denied the one he so badly wanted: "I was penalized for my neatness when we moved over from the old rehearsal space," he grumbled. All of a sudden, I knew this was not the reason why he didn't get his space. It was his negativity, his weirdness that nobody could really put a finger on, that got him in the rehearsal room he most disliked.

Again, back in the rehearsal room to get my purse and notebook, I stated that I had to get going, because by now it was 9:30pm, and I still had an hour-and-a-half drive home. It was as if Martin hadn't heard me. "So, do you wanna get some supper, or go to my place?"

"Umm, no. I've gotta leave, but thanks."

He walked behind the thick velvet curtain in the rehearsal room. "See this back here?" I peered behind the curtain—a mauve leather sofa. No doubt what era that was from. It was a castoff donated to the theatre school for small scene classes and amateur plays.

"Hmmm, looks pretty '80s to me."

He stroked the arm of the sofa in a way that made my skin crawl. "It's leather."

"Yyyyyyep." I looked at my watch. "Martin, I've gotta head on home."

"I'd sure love to get some student naked back here. Don't you think that'd be fun?" He moved to the wall, to the dimmer switch by the door, and turned the halogen stage lights waaaay down. I was getting the creeps, and fast.

"Yyyyyeah, whatever. Uhhhh, I've got to get on home—I have to be at a meeting at 8:00 tomorrow morning."

"Well, okay. I'll see you off, then."

Martin moved to hug me. I was going to make this as short a hug as possible; how he'd been acting had given me the heebie-jeebies (as we say down South), and I remembered why I'd quit dealing with him in the first place.

Martin put his arms around me and squeezed me tight. "Take care of yourself," he said.

And then it happened.

His hands were everywhere, all over my breasts, down the front and back of my pants, tongue forcing its slimy, greasy way down my throat and over my neck. And I was PARALYZED. This was my FRIEND, whom I had not seen in almost six years...was this how people greeted each other after a long absence? I felt as if I were looking at myself from far above, like an out-of-body experience. This could not be my friend doing this to me.

And I was STILL PARALYZED. I look at his arm, visualizing wrenching it in its socket with my bare hands...and I literally could not move. It was something out of a bad dream, like the ones where you try to move or scream but can't, because you're in slow-motion while everyone else is in fast-forward. So much for all those self-defense classes I took in college.

His hand sickeningly caressed my breast. "Stop it," I said.

"Ohhh," he breathed down my neck, "you can't tell me that doesn't feel good. You can't, can you?" His tongue lolled down my neck again.

And suddenly, I had a flashback to when I was nine years old and molested by a trusted family friend. The man who molested me had said very similar words to me when I told him to stop, that it hurt: "Ohhh, that feels good! You like that, don't you? Of course you do." Words that denied what I was experiencing—denying my reality right there in that moment.

Everything about Martin, everything creepy, slimy, and just-not-quite-right, fell into place all at once.

And I had to tell somebody.

Suddenly, I broke free. "I'm leaving now," I said, nauseous and about to start screaming. I grabbed my stuff and stumbled out the door. Martin called from behind, "Be careful out there, it's raining! Next time, let's get something to eat! I'll always love you! Bye!"

I got to my car after running down six flights of stairs; I was buzzing and numb, and Martin's voice and that of my molester rang together in my head. Is this what it's like for veterans to have flashbacks? I wondered. Because if it is, Jesus, I feel for those people. I dialed my mom's number on my cell phone and let her know I was on the way home from Atlanta, and that I'd call her if I had car trouble. She said she'd wait to hear from me again before she went to bed.

And I shook like a tuning fork, veering between rage and nausea, nausea and disgust, all the way home.

[to be continued in 48 hours]

A very difficult situation: Part 1

As I mentioned the other day, I'm dealing with a tough situation right now and am trying to figure out what to do. This post is the first (of many, most likely) about the whole mess. It scares me to write about this.

****************

When I began my abortive acting career in 1998, I was in a bad emotional state. Just out of a sham of a marriage in which I was the sole provider for a selfish, spoiled, manipulative drunk, I was desperate for ANY kind of attention. A career in stage and film—in which I would be world-famous by the time I was 35!—was just the thing to fulfill the deep well of need in my soul.

(Of course, that need was fulfilled years later by my working like hell on myself…but I digress.)

My particular actor training program was very short on affordable monologue coaches. When the time came for me to start auditioning for bigger and better productions than the sad pay-to-play productions that were offered by the acting school—little better than an average community-theatre production—there was only one coach the school recommended: Martin. And, as a naïve newbie, I worked with Martin for the next four years.

There must have been something about me that alerted Martin to my fragile emotional state. When he had been my coach for about a year, he made the first move to begin an intimate relationship with me, and I accepted. I was flattered…but I was also too naïve and not yet enough of a teacher to realize that he had crossed an invisible, inviolable boundary. Real teachers never date students. EVER. Our relationship lasted until 2002, when I found myself on the edge of bankruptcy, and had to drop off the radar of the Atlanta theatre scene. I had had enough of Martin by this time to realize it would never work. I tried to remain friends with him, but he was the kind of person who wants not a partnership of equals, but complete enmeshment with a significant other. And that I cannot abide.

Martin is a sad example of what happens to people when they roll over and let life beat them down. The youngest of three boys in a deeply traditional, deeply Southern, and Mama-centered household, and never handsome in the traditional sense, he was still an excellent actor in his prime, and graduated from a top-notch theatre program with an MFA in acting. From there, he went to New York City in the early 1970s, but came back home to the Deep South when Mama "needed him" after major hemorrhoid surgery. (No, really—that’s why she called him home.) As any working actor will tell you, one year in NYC does NOT a career make, and Martin spent most of his time there miserable, working as a file clerk and avoiding auditions as much as possible. Having seen him play excellent bad guys, miscreants, and perverts in Atlanta shows, I’m convinced that had he stayed, he could have developed into a talent along the lines of Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, or James Woods.

But it was easier to do Mama’s bidding. He came home, and stayed there.

After Mama’s ass healed up, Martin settled unhappily ever after in Atlanta. And when I say unhappily, I mean it. When new business comes his way—when a new opportunity for happiness rolls down his street—Martin turns away, lets it pass him by, and then complains bitterly when someone else gets the chance he refused. When he sees his friends from graduate school who’ve gone on to have a little success in stage, film, or teaching, he bristles with rage: “That BITCH! She slept with ______ while she was seeing me in 1976 in summer stock!” or “[local actor’s name] stole my girlfriend while we were in grad school. And HE gets all the work—it’s all because he has a big dick.” In Martin's mind, these people's success isn't because they bust their butts working, but because of who they've slept with, or their physical attributes. Mm-hmm.

While most working Atlanta actors cobble together four or five part-time jobs to make a decent living, Martin has chosen a life of utter poverty “so [he] can be available all the time for auditions. That’s how an actor has to live.” Over the last 25 years, the most he has ever made in one year is $15,000. He chooses to teach a few classes a year at the theatre program—never as many as they need for him to teach—and refuses to learn about computers or the internet so he can grow his monologue-coaching clientele.

He has not had an audition in two years.

One night last year, Martin came home to find that someone had broken into his apartment and taken $100—no small sum for someone on his income—and the small boom-box he used in his classes. Dear readers, you and I would have run to a neighbor’s house to wait in safety until the police arrived, but Martin simply went inside and fell asleep. He was “too depressed” to call the police.

Two nights later, the thief struck again upstairs where Martin’s landlords live. He took a Bose stereo system and a couple thousand dollars in other valuables. Of course, the landlords called the police right away, and when the officers came downstairs to talk to Martin, they learned that he had failed to alert them 48 hours before after his own place was burglarized. And, of course, the good officer communicated this right away to the folks upstairs.

One of the landlords is a law professor at an Atlanta-area college. It was all he could do to first restrain himself from strangling Martin, and then from evicting him. I’m not sure why he didn’t evict Martin, and I don’t know much about housing law, but not calling the cops when the home you don’t own is burglarized sounds like a good enough reason to get thrown out.

Martin called me for tea and sympathy, but got piss and vinegar. “You had a responsibility to the community to call the cops,” I told him. “What if the thief had beaten the hell out of you? What if he’d been a rapist? What if he is a rapist, and since you didn’t call the police, he breaks into a place and robs and rapes the person who lives there? You could have stopped him, but you didn’t,” I went on. Martin had reached new heights of idiocy. “And now Bob* and Linda* are crawling your ass, and rightfully so. YOU. FUCKED. UP. The best you can do is talk to a lawyer, figure out your rights post-fuck-up, and try to make things right with your landlords.”

Martin threw a 59-year-old temper tantrum—why is beyond me. Why call asking for advice if all you really want is a pat on the head? And why even call for a pat on the head when you’re nearly 60? It’s childish and immature, this never growing up. Evidently, Martin’s role of a lifetime would be Peter Pan.

What’s even creepier about the not-grown-up thing is the disgusting way that he talks about and looks at his younger students—girls and young women between 14 and 22. Women his age do nothing for him, but the way he looks at and talks about his junior-high and high-school students is…well, icky.

Which brings me back to our rehearsal a few weeks ago.

[to be continued tomorrow]

Student Essay Insanity #14!

Lately, I have deprived my readers of their weekly share of Student Essay Insanity. That's right—real sentences from real student essays! It's all for your snarky pleasure, the academic equivalent of Crummy Church Signs!!

I apologize for not having given you fantastically bad sentences all freaking summer long. (My summer students were decent writers.) Now that Fall Semester is well underway, though, more examples of horrifically bad writing are in the works.

I have but one today, but it's a doozie:

• Each of these ass perations will lead me to my career.

(Should that be carear?)

Thanks to all commenters

I appreciate all of your kind comments on the post about DeeDee's passing. You've helped make the heartache a little more bearable.

In between working on class prep for D2U and class prep for Tiny Tech, I'm writing feverishly on a new series of posts dealing with a very serious situation I find myself in right now—one that may involve legal action and careers coming to an end (though hopefully not mine). Will try to post all that in the next day or so.

Farewell, my smiling kitty

Yesterday afternoon, the time finally came for my little smiling tortoiseshell cat—the one I found abandonded three summers ago in the middle of a rural Alabama road frequented by overloaded log trucks—to pass on.

DeeDee had had many ups and downs the last week, and she was feeling slightly better Friday night. However, when Saturday morning came, I knew this was the end.




I had some errands to run late Saturday morning, and when I returned home, I saw she could hardly drag herself to the water bowl to drink. When she tried to stand up, she fell right down. There would be no more ups and downs with DeeDee; she really was too sick to hope for any recovery.

But since it was after 12pm, I couldn't call my usual vets. But I remembered that Small Town Mobile Vet Clinic, whose services I use in times of emergency, was holding their usual Saturday clinic in a local empty lot. I called their number and explained the situation; Dr. Amanda*, who gave DeeDee her first shots and treated her for her kitten diarrhea, told me to come right over.

Upon examination, Dee's gums were very pale. "She's white as a ghost, Kitty," Dr. Amanda* told me. "You're doing the right thing. She's really, really suffering." Amanda felt Dee's weak, emaciated little body, which seemed even more frail lying helplessly on the cold stainless steel of the exam table in the Mobile Clinic van. "Hmmm, I bet her veins are all shrunken up. After I give her the sedative, I'll probably have to do a heart stick. But you don't have to be around for that, if you don't want to. It's OK, a lot of people don't."

"No, Doc, I want to be here," I replied through my tears. "I've put cats to sleep before, and I know they can have convulsions and stuff, but I want Dee to know her Mama loves her. It's closure for me. I'd like to stay."

So Dr. Amanda* gave Dee the sedative, and she, the vet tech, and I gently petted my frail little cat, telling her how pretty and sweet she was. The vet tech gently jiggled Dee's belly: "Ohh, looks like you had some groceries there before you got sick!" I chuckled at that. Indeed, Dee liked to eat a lot before FIV wracked her petite frame; she was a roly-poly little thing almost the whole time she lived with me.

Then the sedative took effect, and we gave DeeDee the final shot. It took only 90 seconds for her heart to stop; Dr. Amanda said that was because she was ready to go, and had been so sick. She gently molded Dee's little body—which was down to 7.6 pounds, having lost over a quarter of her body weight in a week—into a fetal position, taking care to preserve how Dee had put her paw up to her eyes when I lay her down on the exam table. We carefully wrapped her in the old towel I brought, and put her back into the carrier. I would bury her at home.


As I drove home, still wiping away tears, I thought of how, even in sickness, DeeDee always looked cute. She was one of the most photogenic cats I've ever had. If there were ever a kitty looking for a photo op, it was Dee. Even in the picture above, while she had a fever of 104 degrees and was lying in the bathtub trying to get cool, with a water bottle of ice cubes next to her, she still had the eyes and orange-and-black-lined "smile" ready for the camera.

I set Dee down in the kitchen while I went to put the soaker hose on the place where I planned to bury her; this summer's drought has made the ground here harder than week-old cornbread. The other cats could sense that something was wrong; they sniffed the cage with the body of their late sister in it, and meowed a few times.

And suddenly, I was very, very glad to have that bottle of DiSaronno amaretto you see in the background.

It took some doing, but I buried Dee beside Lewis, near the steps of the little storage house out back. I placed old bricks over her grave until I find some nice-looking plants and stones to go around it.

The Circle of Life was evident to me even as I was digging in the red Georgia clay striped with the rich black soil from a hundred years of decaying oak leaves. The shovel's blade kept unearthing bugs of all kinds—roly-polies, small earthworms, Japanese beetle grubs, hibernating cicadas—all of which Myrtle Mae greedily gobbled up.

Bury a kitty, feed a chicken. Life goes on.

I will always remember how, even when their sister was at her sickest, the other cats stayed around her, as if to comfort her while her body was aching. Davy (background) was the one who stayed with her the most. And to think he had a reputation as my most unpleasant and ornery cat.

Hobo Kitty and Ernest also took turns sitting in the hallway with Dee. Ernie was giving her a bath and sniff-over here; he lay down right next to her when he was done.

And Clark, DeeDee's big brother in age as well as size, stayed with her while she was sick. I found Clark five weeks before I found Dee, and for three years they were close buddies.

I will miss playing with and kissing those sweet little tortie toes, dipped in white and orange fur in a little chevron pattern again the black and orange of her foreleg.

God was having fun with cat-fur patterns the day He made DeeDee.

I will miss her silly habit of squeezing herself into the smallest spaces possible, whether in box tops, my briefcase, duffel bags, or between the washer and dryer where there were already two other cats.

I will miss her willingness to "help" with any home-improvement project. When I stripped all the wallpaper from my bathroom walls and got ready to paint the ceiling, Dee was there. She climbed this ladder for ten whole minutes while I took pictures, and kept staring at the ceiling as if she could see all the cracks I was about to cover with patching plaster. Perhaps she was an architect or building inspector in a past life.

I cannot tell you how many times Dee got paint, sheetrock mud, tile grout, or cleanser all over herself in her eagerness to see what Mama was doing to our home.

I will miss her falling asleep mid-bath in the kitchen window on a sunny spring morning—again, she was always ready for the camera, conscious or no.

DeeDee, thank you for giving me three wonderful years of laughs and companionship. I am glad I made Mom pull the car over so I could jump out on the side of that Alabama road and grab you; you were worth all the effort, expense, and heartache. I'll miss your chirpy-purring and knitting on me in the middle of the night...and I will see you on the other side of the Rainbow Bridge.

Farewell, my sweet DeeDee. I love you.

A teaching moment from out of the blue

"Teaching moments" happen all the time, in the classroom and out, for my students and for me. And they usually happen when I least expect them. Teaching moments usually surprise me into reconsidering what I've been doing and how I've been thinking. One that came out of nowhere Friday morning has had me thinking all weekend, and has provided a little respite from my thoughts about my poor little DeeDee, who at this writing is still with us.

Many students wonder why they're required to study literature in the first place. In a world full of electronic media and pursuits much more interesting than reading, why sit down with a story or poem or book whose author's either never been a part of a student's world, or has been dead more years than a student's school has been around?

To a literature person like me, this question is downright pernicious. It keeps students away from literature by maintaining their apathy and fear of academic exercise. It seems to rule out any further inquiry about literature in the way it's always worded. I hope to stamp out this stupid question, as a professor.

We read literature in order to make sense of the world around us, its unfairness, its cruelty, its capriciousness...and its beauty. Literature helps us deal with life's bigger questions in a way—and although I can't put my finger on why it's like that, it just is—that a work of theology just can't explain. And analyzing literature, being able to see bigger patterns and themes beneath the surface trappings, helps us once we get out into the bigger world. We're able to pick up on things, undertones, undercurrents, that other less-well-read people are not.

I try to keep my students' apprehension in mind, especially early in the semester, when they're still freaking out over Comp II. We start slowly by discussing their past experiences with literature—good, bad, or indifferent—and then working up to how they encounter lit every day.

"But we don't read literature every day," they counter. "That's why we're all dreading taking this class!"

And I know that's what they're going to say. But, as 18-year-olds are wont to do, they haven't been paying close enough attention to see the poetry that pops up in their everyday lives. Popular music, of course.

Poetry freaks students out. This is just about universal. Haven't we ALL had a bad experience with a my-way-or-the-highway high school English teacher who gave A's to students who saw Emily Dickinson her way, and F's to those who didn't? I try to get my students to see that poetry isn't necessarily something lofty or highfalutin—although it can be. In the songs they listen to every day, on their iPods, their car stereos, their laptops, poetry makes its sweet, subtle presence known.

Friday morning, we began by examining a few popular songs that I'd picked out for their unusual subject matter, their unique perspective on tough issues. I handed out in advance the lyrics to "Okie from Muskogee" by Merle Haggard, John Prine's "Sam Stone," and Eminem's "Stan." The students were pretty good about asking questions to figure out the meanings, themes, and references in all three songs. I pointed out to them that this was exactly what they'd need to do to read and interpret poetry well, and it would take a lot of practice for them to really get good at it (like it does for any worthwhile endeavor).

After the 8am class, one student stayed after to talk to me. She seemed to be very on edge, a little agitated. So I answered the other students' questions and saved hers for last; I thought she might need some extra time from me. "Yes, Donna*?"

Donna* was dressed to head over to her job at a local insurance company; her professional demeanor and appearance always stand out to me in that class of traditional (18-year-old, sloppily dressed, half-asleep) college students. "Well," she began, "I'm not really sure how to ask this, but..." She paused.

Suddenly, I had a funny feeling in my gut.

"I was reading over the assignments last night, the songs, and I was wondering why exactly you assigned them," she finally said. "I mean—are you asking us to read stuff like that because you're trying to get us out of our shells, or because that's the place where YOU are right now?"

I was stunned. What was she asking? Was she questioning my lesson plan? That was all right; I encourage students to ask why they should give a damn about what we're reading. But...what was she doing asking a question about my emotional state that I thought sounded condescending, out of place, a little holier-than-thou?

"Wait—what exactly do you mean?" I asked Donna.* I had to make sure where she was coming from, make sure I hadn't misinterpreted her tone and question.

"I was just so—so shocked," she continued, "at how negative all these songs are. I mean, one guy's a veteran who overdoses on drugs, and then there's the Okie song, and that last song, whooo!—"

"Which one? 'Stan'?"

"Yes. It was just so inappropriate, and all these songs were so negative, with death and hatred and drugs and all that, and I was just trying to figure out were you trying to force this on us because it was how you are—"

Go fuck yourself if you don't like what we're reading, and take the happy churchy bullshit with you, I thought. I was getting irrational and mightily offended, and I couldn't figure out why. But I said something much different than what I was thinking. (I don't like to think of my students in terms like these.)

"Hang on, Donna*," I said. "You're saying that you didn't like 'Stan' because Eminem cusses a lot in it, right?"

"Right. Why would ANYONE have to talk like that? That's just—just—so far away from anything I've ever experienced."

"Well—that's the point of songs and literature: to get you out of what you've always known and experienced," I said. "You've grown up middle-class, right?" She nodded. "The places where and people with whom Eminem grew up accept cursing as a form of verbal art. There's a whole section of society—SO many more people than you might think—for whom a ton of four-letter words aren't a big deal, and are actually expected out of 'real' people. Both my parents were construction workers—my dad was an irrigation contractor, and my mom's a retired form carpenter—and it took me a looong time to realize that not everybody cursed every other word. For you, coming from a nice, polite middle-class upbringing, this is pretty outlandish. But Eminem is simply 'keepin' it real.' He's honest in this song and doesn't put on airs about where he's from, or how he talks. And he's dealing with a lot of stuff in 'Stan' that is timely for us today: celebrity obsession, mental illness, domestic abuse."

Donna* shook her head. "Ohh, okay. So you're assigning this stuff just to get us to come out of our shells?"

"Yeah, I guess you could say that. I'm trying to get you to think on your own about what we're reading. It's going to be outside of your experience, in a lot of cases. And you're going to encounter a lot of the issues we discuss at some point in life." I paused and thought for a second. "How many TV shows have you ever watched about a person's happy, content life? How many best-sellers have been about a person's story that didn't have anything bad, scary, or difficult in it?"

"What do you mean?" she replied.

"What I'm saying is that happy usually equals boring. We want to know, as human beings, how other human beings dealt with the bad things that happened to them. We want to see how they wrestle with the big questions in life. Literature usually comes out of great pain—for example, after 9/11, Poetry-Portal.com logged over 40,000 poems about the attacks. People write poetry, songs, and literature when something BIG happens, and when they want to put beautiful or difficult moments into words."

"Hmmm, okay," Donna* said. "I didn't mean to catch you off guard, Prof. Kitty. I was just trying to deal with being so shocked at what I read last night, and if you're just trying to get us to think, you know, get us out of our shells, then WOW, I appreciate that. But I wasn't sure whether to drop the class, you know, I was thinking, 'Well, she told us she was raised in the church, and I just can't make sense of why she would give this to us, should I drop the class?' But no, I think I'll stay, because I really appreciate how you're trying to get us to think."

I was raised in the church—the Hell-Fire Baptist Bullshit Church, I thought, by a bitter old woman who told my sister and me that, because we liked Duran Duran, Culture Club, and Prince, Jesus hated us and would send us to hell. But I'll save that for another class and conversation.

"Right, right," I said, starting to feel a little better. "I'm glad that you're asking questions. That's what this class is all about, and college in general, too. And, contrary to what anyone may tell you about us so-called 'liberal college professors': I cannot MAKE you think anything. I cannot 'turn you liberal.' All I can do is present material, maybe get you to talk about it, consider it from different angles. It's fine with me if students are conservative, liberal, middle-of-the-road, radical, whatever. I just want them to be smart about it, to think about why they're that way, and be able to articulate their views in an intelligent way. If you can't eloquently and articulately support your opinion, you have no opinion. Know what I mean?"

"Right!" Donna said. "Umm...this is what I wrote after I read the lyrics to 'Stan' last night; do you mind if I give it to you?"

"Well, no," I said, glancing over what Donna* had written while trying to sort out her thoughts. It was a great example of a student really wrestling with a text, and would probably be beneficial to others in the class. "Can I copy this and use it in future classes? And would you mind if on Monday I brought up this discussion in class? You've raised some really interesting questions, and I think it'd be good if the whole class could get in on the conversation."

"Sure," she replied, "maybe it'll get everyone else thinking, too." She saw me glancing down at my watch, and then over at the Business Building. "Oh, gosh! Sorry if I made you late for your next class, Prof. Kitty. Thanks so much for talking to me. I'll see you Monday!"

But being late for the next class was worth it. We'll see where this 8am Comp II class goes.

DeeDee update #3

Nothing much new. Dee is still alive, and a little better this evening—was doing terribly this afternoon. The end is probably near. I just can't tell when.

More soon.

DeeDee update #2

Inexplicably, DeeDee is still with us. How this is possible, I don't know, as last night at 11:00 I'd made up my mind to take her to the vet for euthanasia this morning.

When I got home Wednesday evening, I called and called for her. She was nowhere to be found; I thought she might have gone under a bed or in a closet to die. But I finally found her lying listlessly in the bathtub, the coolest place in the house. She purred when I petted her and would drink a little water when I gave it to her in a syringe. I knew this was it.

I gave her another dose of the Clavamox (veterinary antibiotic) that Dr. Mike had prescribed to try to get rid of her upper-respiratory infection...and she perked up for a few hours. She purred and chirpy-meowed for a while as I petted her head and scratched her ears and chin.

This morning, she was weak and listless again, and I took her to the vet, sure that this would be it. Dr. Mike was kind enough to see us as soon as I brought Dee's cage into the clinic.

(An aside: The vets and assistants at Piney Woods Vet Hospital* know me and my reputation well. When I walk into the clinic with cat in hand, they don't say "Hi, Kitty!" or "How are you?" but rather, "Well, how many does this make?" or "Kitty, I have a black-and-white mama cat at home with your name on her collar!)

Dr. Mike looked her over and frowned. "With FIV, you just never know. Are we going to lose this battle? Yes. Are we going to lose it today or tomorrow? Hard to say. Every cat is different." He wiped his brow. "Some cats with FIV go downhill really quickly, and some live healthy lives for years after diagnosis. My Spencer lived for seven years with it, and was all right until the very end. And some cats linger on and on, never really well or ill but just sickly. So it's hard to say what Dee's situation is going to be."

He then took her into the back to weight her and listen to her lungs and heart. She was purring too loudly int he exam room for him to hear anything, and Dr. Mike knew a trip into the back to see strange cats would make her stop purring for a just a minute. The news wasn't good. My little smiling tortie cat, who barely weighed eight pounds to begin with, had lost a pound in two days.

But she seemed more alert, as if she could get better.

"Well..." I was unsure as to what to do. She seemed better now than she had been at home, but that might have just been the stimulation of the car trip and the strange smells and sounds all around her. "I don't really know if it's time yet..."

"There's one more thing I think we can try," Dr. Mike replied. He gave her another shot of high-powered antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory to try to reduce her fever further—it was up to 104 on Tuesday, but down to the high end of normal today at 101.4—and gave me a tube of Nutri-Cal nutrional gel to try to stimulate her appetite and avoid fatty liver syndrome, which cats can get if they go without food for too long.

"Call me in 48 hours and let me know what's going on, and we'll just play it from there," Dr. Mike told me.

I grabbed DeeDee's cage and started out to the front desk. "Oh, one more thing..."

"Yes?" Dr. Mike's brow furrowed.

"How will I know when it's time, Doc? I mean—how do I know she's suffering? She doesn't seem like it now, her third eyelid's not up, but she's just so tired and weak..."

Dr. Mike thought for a moment. "You'll know when it's time," he said. "Now, I'm a big believer in appetite, and from Dee's weight loss, I'd have to say the time's getting close. But," he sighed, "you'll know in your heart when it's time to let her go. You really will."

"Thanks, Doc," I said, trying to save my tears for the car ride home. I felt better about Dee, yet still very sad. We drove home, and I made her comfortable again in what has become her favorite place: the bathroom floor.

When I left around 11am to fulfill my office hours at D2U, some of the other cats were lying around DeeDee, as if to keep their sick little sister company. (Dee's second from wall in the background, lying chin-on-paws on the bath mat; behind her is Davy, and in front are Clark and Mama Cat.)

More soon.

DeeDee update

Dee took a turn for the worse overnight. I awoke this morning at 5:45 to find that she'd struggled up onto the bed to be with her Mama; it must have taken every bit of strength she had. She was very, very still and quiet...she didn't seem to be in pain, but just "out of it."

I put her favorite towel on top of her and spent a few minutes petting her and telling her how sorry I was that I didn't see sooner that she was sick, and that I would take her to the vet this evening so she wouldn't have to be sick anymore. I couldn't keep from crying, even though I knew I'd have puffy eyes in my 8am class.

More soon.

A lesson learned

I noticed on Sunday that DeeDee, the sweet tortie cat whom I found in the middle of a rural Alabama road when she was barely five weeks old, wasn't acting like her usual friendly, meowy self. At first I chalked it up to all the new cats in the house, but she was hardly eating or drinking, and had very little energy. This morning, I took DeeDee to the vet for a check-up just to be on the safe side.

She's FIV-positive. Which means certain death, at some point.

I chose to treat the upper-respiratory infection she has right now, with the full understanding that she might not get over it. She might go downhill very quickly over the next few days, and she might get past the cough/cold and be all right for another five or six years. It's hard to say what her quality of life will be.

It's also hard to say how many—IF any—of my other cats are infected. DeeDee's pretty low in the social order around here, so she's probably not bitten anyone and passed it on. However, one of the others might have bitten her and transmitted the virus, or she might have had it all along, from the time I found her eating a squished-flat dead rat in the middle of a rough country road over in Dingleberry, Alabama.

Thinking back to when I found her, though, I can perhaps see that she had the infection then. She and Clark both had awful diarrhea for a couple weeks, which went away just as suddenly as it had appeared. I should haul Clark's fat behind to the vet, too, just to be sure...even though he seems as if he feels fine right now.

Dee's home now, and still very lethargic. We'll see how the next 48 hours go. I've accepted that euthanasia might be the best route if her condition gets worse.

The lesson here: Always get the FIV/FeLV test when your vet offers it. It may save you some heartbreak.

UPDATED: ...and we have LIFTOFF!

Friday's dramatic monologue on the first day of class—in place of the usual boring, dry "Here's the syllabus, here are the books, now go home"—was an unqualified success! The students gave me their full attention without my having to ask for it, which is a teacher's dream and goal. I got across to my students how passionate I am about literature, and let them know I expected a great deal of them in this class. And it worked.

I have four Comp II classes in a row on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I did almost the same thing for each class. Each time, I waited until the very last minute to walk in. Dressed in a conservative-looking tan-and-white cotton dress—a pattern from the 1940s that Mom adapted to fit my frame—and with tons of books in hand, I shuffled into the classroom. Ahhh, the stereotypical college English professor. Nothing to fear out of this one, I imagine my students were thinking.

"Everybody here for English II, Professor Kitty B. Goode?" I asked. The students nodded their heads each time. I then stood at the front of the room, staring at them much longer than was comfortable (and trying to get over my pounding heart and the lump in my throat), sighed a few times, shook a little bit with nerves and a facial tic, and began speaking as Wanda from Christopher Durang's Wanda's Visit (quoted here without permission). I changed a few of the details and names around to make it a little more believeable...

I could have had a happy life if I’d married Russell. Please don't judge me for talking like this! I just want you people to know how lucky you are—how lucky you are to be in a college classroom TO-day. It all started the summer after high school graduation. I was promiscuous. Well, I don’t like to use that word. I slept around uncontrollably, that’s what I prefer to say. It was awful. I became a campus joke, but it was because I was drowning my sorrow, you see—in flesh. There was this one night a whole bunch of guys from the football team stood outside my window and they chanted my name. The campus minister once had to give a whole sermon against me, which made me feel just awful. And all because I was pining for Russ. And of course I was raised Church of God, so I knew what I was doing was very, very wrong, but I was so unhappy…and then my second husband gave me herpes, and every time the first one would call to threaten my life, it would trigger an outbreak. Herpes is often set off by emotional turmoil, you know. And then I thought to hell with men, maybe I should become a lesbian. And I tried that, but the problem was I just wasn’t attracted to women, so the whole experiment was a dismal failure. So then there was that guy from prison, and then there was his father, Fred. Did I tell you about Fred? Well, Fred said to me, “You know, Kitty, I married you because I thought you would be my anchor in the port of life, but now I think you’re stark-raving mad”…and I said, “You think I’m crazy, who’s the one who has hallucinations, and thinks that shoes go on the hands instead of the feet? Not me, buddy boy!” So one day the washing machine blew up, and Fred said to me, “You did that, everything about you is chaos, I’m leaving and I’m taking Tranquility with me”—Tranquility was our dog—and I said, “I’m the one who fed Tranquility, and walked her and took care of her worms, and she used to throw up on the rug, and of course you can’t just leave it there…" When you live with someone, you don’t have any secrets. I remember David said to me, "Why didn’t you tell me you had herpes?" And I said, "I forgot, okay? People forget things, all right?" And he said, "Not all right, I’m going to have this for life," and I said, "So what, you have your nose for life, is that my fault?" So then I thought I’d stay out of relationships for a while, and I went to work for this lawyer, only he wasn’t a regular lawyer. He was a kingpin of crime, only I didn’t realize it. Eventually, of course, I had to get my face redone so they couldn’t find me. But I better not say anything more about this right now. It reminds me of my life with Augie. He was really violent, but he was really little, so I was able to PUSH him down the stairs. I just love New England, I worked in Hartford for three weeks once as a receptionist in a sperm bank. So I got fired from the sperm bank, and then I went to Santa Fe, because I heard the furniture was nice there. And then Arthur’s ex-wife kept making threatening phone calls, and I said, “Billy, why didn’t you tell me you were 16?” And then the policeman said, “Take off all your clothes,” and I thought, “Hey, maybe this way I won’t get a ticket.” And then Leonard said, “Kitty, you are a worthless piece of trash.” And I said, “Don’t you think I know that? Do you think this is NEWS?” And Howard said he wanted me to kill his mother, and I said, "Are you CRAZY? I’ve never even MET your mother," and he said, "All right, I’ll introduce you."

I did ALL of this in one long rush, emotion crescendoing and then falling off again, as if I were truly off my rocker. Most students sat there with slack jaws. A few giggled very uncomfortably.

And then I changed directions, using part of Aaron Levy's monologue Shoes that he included in the article I mentioned earlier (also quoted here without permission):

Can I be truthful here? I’m going to be honest, I’m going to tell you how I really feel. Please.......I would like to tell you the real deal about me, if that’s allowed. Can that happen? I wonder this. Out loud. Well…for real. Here comes the truth. You can write it down if you want. I mean, that’s why you’re here today, right? For a little honesty. You walk in, walk out with the truth. That’s fair, I’ve been stalling, I admit. Well, here it is. For real. Have you ever been someplace really public, where you wanted to leave a somewhat impressionable impression, like a long bathroom line at a party? Someplace where you’re forced to be among people. You’ve got to pee, he’s gotta pee, she’s gotta pee, everybody in line is waiting for the person who had to pee before all of you. Nobody’s goin’ anyplace until ol’ Watermelon Kidney in there gets done with his or her business. You’re captive, you know. Like in a classroom, you almost HAVE to be there. Here. And all of a sudden, I mean you never saw it coming, but it’s inevitable, the focus is on you. And you feel like this special soul x-ray is cast on your entire person, and it gets past your bones, cause they don’t matter, right? It gets right to your guts, see, and while it’s happening time becomes like…like subtime, metatime, and everything that happens in your esophagus and your stomach and your blood and your cells only reminds you that when the people see your soul, and, guts in the little x-ray picture, all that will be there will be a big can of Play-Doh? I mean…do you ever feel that way?

And the students, thinking they were going to get the "real deal" about this evidently psychotic professor, had just been fed another line of crap. Many of them by now were looking toward the door, or at their watches, or down at their notebooks. And I broke character, back to Professor Kitty B. Goode, and said in my usual "professor voice:"

Please get out a piece of paper and write your impressions of the class so far. [students hesitate; I clap my hands loudly] Do it!

I gave them three or four minutes to write down their impressions. There was a little talking during this time, but not much. Then I asked students to read aloud what they'd written.

"Too much, too early; too intense," read one frat-boy type. "We're not awake yet." That got a big laugh from all of us. Another read, "Either Prof. Kitty is off her meds, or is a very passionate professor. This class will either be very fun or very challenging, or both, I hope." One student had written, "How on earth did Professor Kitty find time to go to school while being married all these times? Her life story is turbulent but interesting." Yet another read, "This professor has really lost her marbles...or is it all an act? We can't tell. I'm looking at my classmates' faces as she talks, and there's a wide array of emotions, from fear to happiness to disbelief, on people's faces. This is going to be different."

This was exactly what I wanted to happen.

"You didn't know what to think, did you?" I asked the students. They nodded. "You were wondering, 'What the hell have I walked into?' or maybe, 'Is this God's way of telling me to drop out of college?'" They laughed at that one. I continued, "What I just did—and what you just did—is what good literature is all about. You questioned this 'character' you saw up here. And you always need to do that when you're reading, because some narrators and characters are unreliable." I took a drink of water. "A really good story pulls you in without your knowing it. You give it your full attention without anyone having to ask—and that's what you just did for me. You paid attention, and I didn't even have to ask you to do it."

I moved to get the syllabi and hand them out. "Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to know right now that I am VERY passionate about teaching. THIS is my dream, right here in this room: to be teaching YOU first-year college English. I am flat-out, 100 miles an hour, from the time class begins to the time it lets out, and I am ALWAYS this enthusiastic. I expect students to come in here just as fired up as I am. If this sort of passionate study isn't your cup of tea, then I encourage you to go on down to the Registrar's Office right now and drop this class. My feelings won't be hurt."

Nobody in ANY of the four classes moved a muscle at this point. Then I handed out the syllabus.

After each class finished, a few students stayed behind with questions about books or classwork, or (and this amazed the hell out of me) to thank me for being so on fire for teaching. One student in the 10am class stayed to explain that she'd sometimes arrive to class wearing red-tinted glasses to ease the pain from her migraines. I thanked her for letting me know, and told her I wouldn't take it as a sign of disrespect.

"Professor Kitty, I signed up for your class because I saw you had high ratings on RateMyProfessors.com. But this morning was something else! I bet your ratings are going to go through the roof now!"

I laughed and told her I don't take RateMyProfessors very seriously, that many of the ratings I'd seen about myself on there were completely misguided, or were simply put up there just to be mean. I'd seen ratings picking on my wardrobe, hairdo, accent, and so on. "What will really make a difference to me," I told her, "is if people come out of here and resolve to actually read a work of literature even though they don't have to take any more English classes. It'll make a big difference if you folks come out of here with sharper analytical and critical-thinking skills."

Aaron Levy writes in his article that he's "not doing this [monologue on the first day of class] to win the Best Teacher of the Year award. [He's] doing it to get [his] students' attention." And that was my goal, too, in adopting his exercise and a far-out character. I wanted the class to be rip-roaring enthusiastic from the first day, and the best way to do that is to show them just how passionate, just how excited I am about reading and teaching literature.

As the day wound down, I sat in my office, happy and thankful that the experiment had been a success. (And, naturally, I was tired as all get-out. I slept almost 11 hours Friday night and Saturday morning.)

Aaron Levy, thank you for your awesome article, and for inspiring a professor and over a hundred Comp II students. Here's to a fantastic semester!

I spend so much time here...

...I'd might as well move in a cot.

Really, though—I'm looking for a seating option for my teensy little office that will convert into someplace I can take a quick nap between my morning and afternoon classes.

Skeeter*, my very obese student from Summer Term, taught me many valuable lessons, one of which is: not everybody can fit into the circa-1972 office chair I have sitting catty-corner to my desk. Students larger than a women's Size 22 (or men's XXL) have a tough time getting in and out of that chair. People are more likely to work better with me when they're more physically comfortable; feeling crowded or squished physically can make us feel that way emotionally and intellectually. And I have no place to nap in this office except the floor, which is cold, hard, and smelly.

For someone like me, who treasures any opportunity to recharge her batteries during the day, this is not good.

I looked at a full-size, metal-frame futon in Wal-Mart the other night—a steal at $98, yippee!—but was dismayed when I measured the available space in my office. The futon is 78" long and 35" high, but the problem is its 36" depth. That would leave me only seven inches of room to get between it and my desk. Ouch. Not gonna work.

So...what to do? Can anyone suggest an affordable piece of furniture for sitting/sleeping that will fit into an area about 78" L x 30" D x 35" H? Years ago, a friend of mine in the dorm at UGA had a small, nearly-twin-sized futon beneath her loft/bunk bed, but I've no idea where to find one today.

I have Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes this semester, so my big day is tomorrow. I'll update you then on how the first-day-of-class monologue goes!

Nip it in the bud!

I still laugh whenever I hear Barney Fife speak that line on reruns of The Andy Griffith Show.

At yesterday's university-wide faculty meeting, a few of us were discussing the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which college students try to manipulate professors into giving them the grades they desire (instead of doing the work). Dr. Cornell* said he was going to put something on his syllabus about "grade intimidation," but didn't yet know how he was going to word it. Linda-Lou* and I agreed. It was high time someone spoke up early in the term and let students know that kind of crap wouldn't fly. So we came up with this tidbit to go on our syllabi:

How you do in this class is UP TO YOU, based on the quality of YOUR work. Please refrain from telling me, “I need an A, a B [or other grade] in this class to keep my scholarship.” Whether or not you intend it to be, this request can be taken as a passive and subtle form of manipulation, which interferes with my honest evaluation of your work and progress. Keep these requests for specific grades to yourself, and work hard.

Will it work? Only time will tell—the new semester starts Thursday.

Armageddon is upon us.

The D2U mama cat has been at my house almost a week, and things are going well, considering what an ass-kicker she is. Upon her arrival, she beat up Clark, Davy, and Ernest all within five minutes, and has put all the HKC's cats on notice that she does not take shit from anybody.

But from this photo, I assume that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will soon be galloping down my street—Mama Cat and Davy, aka Shithook, are lying here as sweet as can be. There was no hissing or spitting. Maybe each didn't realize that the other was just a few inches away, and that each cat's street cred was in serious trouble.

Her baby, Wide Lawns Kitteh, is also doing just fine. Although she and Mama no longer recognize one another, they get along well.

More tomorrow, I hope. Today's meetings wore me out.

Shaking things up, and taking big risks

Today finds me sitting in my office at D2U, catching up on my reading of the new semester's textbooks and trying to formulate some sort of plan of attack for the term. Over the last couple of years, I've realized that my students are bored with Comp II (Writing about Literature), and not just because they're typical "entertain me, and God forbid I should have to work at anything" teenagers. They're bored because...it's actually boring.

And I've become bored with it, too.

I've been treating Comp II as a literature survey class, not as the second unit of first-year composition—that was where I was going wrong. The students in Comp II are usually only slightly better writers than they were in Comp I, but I was expecting much sharper writing skills out of them. Students in Comp II still need a lot of instruction on the basics of effective writing. So my approach all along has been too advanced; the students haven't been writing as well as I'd expected because my expectations have been those of sophomores, not second-semester freshmen.

It was Dr. Rhettencomp* who called my attention to my mistake back in March: "Kitty, the class's subtitle is 'Writing about Literature,' and I want for our department to concentrate on the writing part. That's the objective of the whole 1101-1102 sequence."

It is? I wondered. I'm sure my face turned bright red.

I felt dumb for not realizing this sooner, but at least I'd finally figured out what was wrong with the class...why my students, who had been SO enthusiastic and happy to be in class the previous semester were now falling asleep in class, so bleary-eyed and apathetic. (Okay, so some of that had to be all the clubbing and drinking they started doing spring semester.)

My Comp I classes are fairly popular at D2U. They fill up rather quickly, and I get several requests every semester to allow a few overloads. I think the class is popular because I try to get students to think critically about our consumer culture and mass media, especially that which is marketed to their age group (18-23). And it's probably also because I'm a pedal-to-the-metal, zero-to-100-in-6.5-seconds teacher—I'm so enthusiastic about teaching English that I'm flat-out for the entire class period, and when I have conferences with students as well. Maybe it's a cult of personality, but I'd like to think this approach grabs my students and gets them enthusiastic as well.

I began thinking about the new class in earnest back in March, and started looking for new ways to grow, and new things to try. It meant taking some big risks, which I find exceptionally scary in the classroom, but the "still, small voice" in the back of my mind told me it would all pay off.

I needed a new approach in the classroom, too—a new approach to lecturing. I'd been going in a direction 180 degrees from my usual approach to Comp I. Instead of being ovaries-to-the-wall and enthusiastic as I was in Comp I, I was stale, boring, the literature professor who takes herself a little too seriously.

I started with a new textbook: Making Literature Matter. Its title grabbed me right away, as that is what I want to do with the students in my Comp II who are probably taking their very last English class ever. Perhaps the thematic connections between works will shake things up for students who are always asking, "Why do we have to read this? How does this matter in today's world?" And with the way Making Literature Matter groups its selections, we have several different literary genres to examine in each unit. While that will mess me up a little from my usual schedule of teaching poetry first, then short fiction, then drama, but that's probably a good thing. I've been teaching the same things in the same order for almost ten years, and it's high time for a change.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster will also help, too. It explains so clearly what I've struggled with for years: how to explain to students how I interpret what we read. To me, the reasons for the interpretations are there as clearly as day, but my students (bless their hearts) haven't been trained in that kind of very close reading. To aid my lectures (i.e., not on the Required Texts list) is The Complete Idiot's Guide to Critical Reading, by Amy Wall and Regina Wall. This is a pretty good explanation of how and why close reading is done, and how it benefits readers of all kinds. I think I can incorporate a lot of the material into lectures, especially early in the semester.

But how could else could I freshen up my Comp II? I knew the new texts would help. But what else? From whom (or what) could I get some guidance? Most of my colleagues taught in a similar fashion to how I'd been teaching, and could only provide so much help.

Then I stumbled across a journal article that shook me up.

As a member of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), I get their "Inbox" newsletter every Wednesday. It's full of great articles and teaching tips, and I look forward to opening my e-mail and perusing all the timely information. I find something I can use in almost every issue. In one particular "Inbox" in the spring, there was an article from Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC), one of my favorite journals. (It's not just for junior-college professors, but anyone who teaches any English classes.) The article, from the May 2004 issue of TETYC, was entitled "Teaching: First Impressions First, or Choosing Atmosphere over Method and Management." Its author, Dr. Aaron Levy of Kennesaw State University near Atlanta, advocates using that ever-so-important first day of the semester to set the tone for the rest of the term...even if that means paying less attention to the syllabus, procedures, and policies on that very first day.

I was intrigued at first, and then blown away.

Levy's background was in theatre, both as actor and playwright, before he returned to graduate school for a Ph.D. in English. He notes that "the many things that [make him] passionate about writing—creativity, performing, being out on a limb—[are] also inherent in successful teaching." He proposes in his article an approach for the very first day of an English course that melds performance, composition, and literature.

Levy walks into the classroom at the start of the period and looks at the students for much longer than is comfortable. This he does on purpose; it gets the students away from what they expect from the first day of a college course—"here's the syllabus, here are the rules, go get your books, have a good day"—and makes them begin to wonder just what this wacky fellow's class is going to be about. Levy, a "bald guy in a tie" in front of the classroom, leaves the room and returns with a pair of beat-up basketball shoes. He then launches into a monologue, delivered completely naturally thanks to his theatre background, about the shoes, and how students shouldn't judge him just by those shoes. (The character is one Levy wrote up years ago, a young man with a shoe obsession who, in order to buy the $200 pair of Air Jordans he craves, sells bad heroin to a friend. In the monologue, the character tries to justify what he's done.)

The monologue takes several other twists and turns, and ideally, it shakes the students' expectations of their English class to the core. Levy later segues the monologue into, "get out a piece of paper and write down your impressions of the class so far." The stunned students naturally do so, and Levy later takes their surprise, shock, and discomfort and turns it into important things to keep in mind while writing: audience, the element of the unexpected, unreliable narrators, and so forth. All during the semester, he keeps referring to this unusual first day of class to remind his students of these important pointers on writing. His number-one mantra is, "Don't be boring."

I read the article a couple of times and thought about it for a few months before I finally got up the guts to try this on the first day of class. Since I'm young-ish, petite, and female, I thought I'd try something altogether different from the "Shoes" monologue...something believeable for what and who I look like. I chose a monologue from a Christopher Durang play, "Wanda's Visit," in which Wanda tells her old boyfriend about how miserable she's been since they broke up in high school. Wanda veers from anger to sadness to calm in just a few lines, and it doesn't take long for her audience to realize that there's something very wrong with this woman. The "Wanda" monologue was my comic piece when I was doing regular stage and film auditions around Atlanta, and it both got me work and got me into the heads of area directors.

It's been six years since I last auditioned for a show, so I'm going to need some serious help making it natural and believable. My old acting coach in Atlanta has agreed to help me out and let me pay him when my first full-time D2U check arrives on August 31.

Will this work? I don't know. I think the students are mature enough for a PG-13 monologue. They're all adults. I ran the idea by Dr. Rhettencomp,* who thought it was an awesome idea: "If it makes you more enthusiastic, Kitty, then go for it. That's what the class is all about. A lot of professors could never follow your act, but you've got the background to do it. But let me ask you this: what are you going to do to follow it up the next class meeting?"

"I don't know," I replied, "but I know I'll think of something, a way to continue the lesson."

We shall see how this works out.

Pictures from a very busy day

The last couple of days have been particularly busy; this is the beginning of D2U's Faculty Planning Week, so all full-time employees are expected to be on campus doing something in the week or ten days before Fall classes begin. Yesterday and today marked the beginning of the numerous New Faculty Orientation meetings, so I've been on campus and in one conference room or another for the last couple of days. Next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday will be much the same, and then Fall Semester starts on Thursday.

These pix are out of chronological order. Sorry. I'm too hot and lazy to go back and correct them. It was 104 degrees in D2U City today, and I'm like a limp rag from all the heat.


5:55 a.m.: Wide Lawns Kitteh (the D2U kitten) has discovered the kitchen window, and she loves sitting where she can watch the back yard. Here, she sees her foster mama coming toward her, so she's getting down into the floor for a head scratch.

5:52 p.m.: Myrtle Mae is one happy chicken when my neighbors let her have the rotten fruit from their watermelon patch. These melons would've been good eating...except they have huge blackish places on the underside of their rinds.

8:45 a.m.: Am I the only one who thinks this cheese danish looks rather...umm...feminine?

12:05 p.m.: Proof that Division II University loves its new full-timers—a catered lunch from my favorite local BBQ joint. Buttermilk pie, banana pudding, chocolate-pecan pie, and sweet tea rounded out the spread.

More great stuff to come this weekend. I'm busting out syllabi and getting my first-week lesson plans together over the next few days...and also finally posting a couple things that are long overdue.

Her name is Wide Lawns...

...because Subservient No More "can has this kitteh."

Feeling like a dumb shit

I turned in my grades for the Small Military College ethics class this morning...only to realize that one student, who had worked exceptionally hard and was an intelligent and outspoken participant in our classroom discussions, was not listed on my final roll.

This means that he will not get credit for the class—for spending thirty hours over three weekends working on this stuff.

I'm glad that I'm now no longer an SMC employee, because I know this fuck-up will not endear me to the administration. Ugh. Hopefully, either D2U will renew my full-time contract next year, or the SMC folks will have forgotten my transgressions by next May. I think the former is most likely.

[deep sigh]

Still working on getting the poor fellow credit for the class. I'll post an update later.

Home again, home again

Walked in the door, happy and relaxed, about two hours ago. And, of course, I turned the window A/C unit in the den on full blast.

The little D2U campus kitten isn't a fool. She knows to get in the recliner, where the cool air can blow right on her...papers, Amazon.com box, and The Ultimate WebCT Handbook be damned.

It's 97 degrees here in Small Town today, and with the 46% humidity hanging about in the air, it feels like 104.

On the road again...

I'm going out of town this weekend to see an old friend in Atlanta, so there probablt won't be any new posts until Sunday evening. Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. I know I will; this is one of my last breaks until D2U's fall semester starts in mid-August.


And here's Kitty Kamakura, who still shows up at the Happy Kitten Cottage about twice a week. She walked up this morning, sleek and pretty, her scraggly winter coat long gone, for a bite of Fancy Feast. Kamakura's not yet in heat again, but soon will be. I'm calling my vet to make a spay appointment for her, too, in addition to the D2U mama cat.

Cat Magnet, Part 3; or, If Only I Could Put Them on the Fridge!

Continuing the story of the D2U campus kitties...

Every morning for the next few days, I returned to the shrubs in front of the D2U Student Fitness Center to feed the mama cat and her two babies. Some mornings I saw them; some I didn't. But the food was always eaten, and my cans were always cleaned up by someone.

The small cage with the towel in it had also disappeared. Hmmmm. Perhaps someone gave up trying to catch the kitties? It was hard to tell, because no one I had talked to knew the identity of the other person feeding the cats.

Then, on a Thursday morning, I was waist-deep in daphne bushes and emptying out another can of Tuna Delight when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned to find a middle-aged, curly-haired woman in medical scrubs. She grinned widely and said, "So you're other person feeding the kitties!"

I laughed and said, "No, you're the other person feeding the kitties!" We laughed and introduced ourselves. "I'm Kitty B. Goode, English Department."

She extended her hand. "Billie*—it's nice to finally meet you. I'm a nurse at the Student Health Center. Good to meet a fellow cat lover!" She set the plate of kibbles down for the kittens, who were by now hiding again and unsure what to make of TWO people talking and making racket.

"I've been trying to tame the mama cat so I can get her spayed," I said.

"Well, I just felt sorry for them, so I began feeding them a few weeks ago. But my student assistant caught one of the babies last week and decided to keep her."

"Wait," I sputtered. "There are more than two?"

"There were four," Billie* told me, "but we don't know what happened to the little gray striped one. Jill* has the half-Himalayan one. I was going to borrow a humane trap from the animal shelter and see if I could catch them."

I was SO happy to hear this! "Well, if you catch them, let me know and I'll help you take care of them. I have eight cats in the house right now, but I have a spare bedroom where I can foster a couple more."

Billie* laughed. "Ahh, you're at the point where a couple more don't matter, huh?"

"Yep, that's about it," I said. We exchanged phone numbers, and Billie* said she'd call me if and when she caught the kitties; she was planning to stop by the Humane Society and borrow a trap that very afternoon.

The next morning, I was sitting in my office at D2U when my cell phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number, but it had a D2U City prefix. I have a few online students in D2U City, so I answered the call.

"Hi, Kitty, it's Billie! I trapped all three of the kitties just this morning! How do you want to split them up? I can take the mama; I think I might have a home for at least one of the kittens."

I was amazed! She'd caught them already? All three? Damn, this lady had a magic touch for kitties. I volunteered to take one kitten for now, and I'd take the mother cat when her milk had dried up. That was when my vet had told me it was safest to spay.

On Monday, I brought my small Pet Taxi with me to D2U. I went home right after my Comp I class let out; Billie* had gone home on her lunch break to pick up the kitten, sho was doing surprisingly well with her two large dogs.

I put the littlest one in the carrier, and started home.

Isn't she adorable? She yowled for most of the trip, poor thing.

When I got her to the Happy Kitten Cottage, I let her stay in the bathroom for an evening, just to get used to the place. She quickly found that the toilet lid is a cool and safe place to be.

And then she discovered the sink. It's a good place to hide from Clark and Davy.

And the counter, with all my various makeup and junk on it.

And then I took her into the rest of the house, to scout everything out and briefly meet the other cats. "The kitchen is soooo big, Miss Kitty!"

After this shot, I put her down in the floor in the den. She immediately hissed at Clark and tried to climb the bookshelf. Ummmm, no.

So I cleaned up the back bedroom a little and put her back there temporarily.

Every time I walk onto the back porch, she meows at me from the window of her little hideaway. It's fun to sit in the window and safely watch the world (and the chicken) go by.

I'm letting the littlest one out for a couple hours every evening; she's slowly getting used to the rest of the house, and to other cats. Right now, as I type, she's purring in my lap and thinking about pouncing into the floor on Ernest's head.

The best news of all? Two parts:

1. The mama cat will be coming to stay with me next week, and her spay appointment is August 27.

2. The senior English Department receptionist wants to adopt this little cat! HOORAY!

Cat Magnet, Part 2; or, They Stick to Me Like Iron Filings!

Thanks to everyone for your kind words on yesterday's "Defining Moments" post. That one really took a lot out of me to write.

Today, I continue the story I began a few weeks ago, when I discovered a mama cat and two kittens living in the shrubs near the D2U Student Fitness Center.

I continued feeding the cat and kittens every day, even weekends, and I kept on noticing that someone was cleaning up my empty cat-food cans (I left them on site so the cats could lick up every last bit of nutrition from them). I asked around campus, but nobody I knew had seen another person feeding those cats.

One morning, I walked over to feed the three scruffy girls (at least, as far as I could tell they were all female), but found NO KITTIES.

Where could they be? It was only 9:00 a.m., and still cool enough for them to be lounging about in the shrubs. I called and called, yet I heard no meows in reply. Hmmmm. Mama Cat usually will give me a scratchy meow when I call, I thought.

So I looked around the area in front of the Fitness Center. There's a big half-assed gazebo there, overgrown with a huge yellow rambling rose...



Didn't see them in there.

But then I started looking more closely at my surroundings. Up atop the gazebo...

...was the mama cat!

She certainly knew how to stay cool. I guess if your body's covered in fur, you get hot much earlier in the day than non-furry creatures.

"Hi, fweet girl!" I said to her. "How are you? Whatcha do wif your bebehs?" You know how cats love that baby talk. [smirk]

Ha! There's a baby, perched even further back in the brambles than its mama!

She's certainly a good mama, I thought. She hides her babies so well that only the most nosy cat-loving human can find them.

So I went on to put out some food for the cats in case they were hungry. I stepped through the bushes, itching like crazy due to the mosquitos having breakfast on my ankles, and popped the can open.

Wait, what the—?

A cage! With a little towel in it, too, for kitties' comfort!

Who put this out? I could only assume it was the person who'd been feeding them when I wasn't around. And that person must have had kind intentions. This wasn't a leg trap or anything like that.

So I went back into the cool of my office, thankful that someone else out there was having the same idea I did about the kitties living in front of the Student Fitness Center.

But who the hell was it? D2U's not a very big campus; word would have to get around soon that Prof. Kitty B. Goode in the English Department was trying to get in touch with the other person feeding the center-campus kitties.