The 5th day of December,
Is a day for all to remember.
The birthday of Ron,
A wonderful son…
Or was that the 5th of September?

There once was a man named Ron,
Who looked very much like a con,
His 45th is today,
So we hope and we pray,
By nightfall his life will not be done.

There once was a man named Ronald,
Who looks like the one called McDonald,
He’s happy and fun,
And makes a good pun,
So where can I meet this McDonald?

Ronald was a dear old dad,
He acted very really rad,
But with kids,
He ran and hids,
And so made them very sad.

R eally
O ne
N ice
A nd
L ikeable
D ad !

Chorus:
Ronald Million keep it up,
Ronald Million’s dandy,
Mind is sometimes outer-spaced,
And this song was wrote by Randy.

Then he read the signs to fast,
He thinks Pop-Tarts are free,
I do not think that he knows,
It’s a place to Stop and Pee…

Chorus

Ronald went to get a pole,
To fish upon the water,
He fell down while on the rocks
Now with his butt he hollers…

Chorus

One night we went to Drunken Jacks.
He looked to like an ogre,
He tried to make a film of us,
But he was not very sober…

Chorus

Ron took us to a waterpark,
It was quite a lot of fun.
But I think I’ll tell him next time,
To turn the water on…

(The lights come up on a stage set with two desks facing each other. Randy and Jessica are sitting in the desks and they are already talking when the curtain goes up.)

Randy:
Hey Jessica, you have any ideas for this play?

Jessica:
No.

Randy:
Brainstorm then.

Jessica:
Ok.

Jessica: (thoughtfully)
Two people, sitting in McDonald's, eating.

Randy:
What else?

Jessica:
Coming from just seeing a play.

Randy: (writing furiously)
Ok.

Jessica:
Are they male or female?

Randy:
We will be playing these characters.

Jessica:
Ok, you be the guy, and I'll be the girl. Or you be the girl and I'll be the guy.

Randy:
Ok. What about names?

Jessica:
Gene and Bob.

Randy:
That's good.

Jessica: (looking over and pointing)
That's G-E-A-N.

Randy:
I'm having trouble writing all this down.

Jessica:
Ok, I have an idea. I can see Jean saying, "but we can't write about sex, pregnancy, or AIDS. Not about social issues." Then he gives an exasperated sigh. Bob says, "I know what we can write."

Randy: (still taking dictation furiously)
I need one of those tape recorders.

Jessica:
I can just see him waving a skull and saying "Cow, cow, how do I love thee, let me count the ways."

Randy:
How long does this have to be?

Jessica:
I don't know.

Randy:
Mr. Jarboe! (A stunning silence from the ever-talking teacher, Mr. Jarboe?!?)

Jessica:
Valerie, how long does this have to be?

Valerie:
A couple of minutes.

John:
A minute and a half.

Jessica:
I think we can handle this. (Randy continues to write.) Wait a minute. Are you writing down everything I say?

Randy:
Un-huh.

Jessica:
We can't do a play like this.

Randy:
Yes we can.

Jessica:
No we can't.

Randy:
Yes we can.

Jessica:
No we can't.

Randy:
Yes we can.

Jessica:
Randall, you are crazy.

End of How to Write a Play

All this week my mom and my dad, along with Mrs. Trotter and Mrs. Ali, have been telling me to finish my speech, and as I walked down the aisle, I came to a startling conclusion: being the great procrastinator, I still need to write my speech, preferably soon. But being rather poor at public speaking, and having so little time, I decided to collect suggestions from my friends, which they scribbled on little scraps of paper and handed to me. The first paper that I was handed said “write a speech on music.” And so I did.

Music is the international medium through which all facets of life can be explained. This music throughout the ages can be used to explain what happened over these past four years like no other medium can. And anything that can explain the complexities of life must be something very special indeed. As we remember and attempt to understand these past four years-it’s all in the music.

During our eighth grade year all of the high schools came out to us and said Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be, as a friend. And so all of us came, to Louisville Central High School, where we realized a whole new world.

Four hundred of us wild eyed freshmen came to a place wherebig shot seniors generally accepted the fact that we wereYoung, Dumb, and Ugly and we shouted such phrases as we don’t need no education.

Sophomore year continued much the same way with the seniors shouting Beat It and the cafeteria workers crying Eat It. Later we were entuned to the fact that we’ve got to get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do. In the words of the late great Jim Morrison I woke up this morning and went to school. Yes we had discovered other people and true love. Many people learned how to bust a move and give it away, and the phrase people are still having sex became a buzz word.

Junior year was a hard year for relationships and many people cried I want my baby back, gotta have my baby back, I miss her oh so much, can’t live without her touch. As the year wore on we said another one bites the dust as the droput rate continued to rise. In the still of the night we reflected that next year we would be seniors and could truly say that_ we are the champions_.

As seniors we realized that we were reaching the point of no return and we asked ourselves is this the end? As the year flew by senior year was truly one moment in time. And looking back, it’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday, because it seems as if this is the end of the road. We didn’t start the fire that burns within us, beckoning us to stay. We didn’t light, but we’re trying to fight it becausethis is the end, beautiful friend, this is the end, my only friend, the end. Our graduation from Louisville Central High School. It’s the end of the world as we know it, it’s the end of the world as we know it, it’s the end of the world as we know it, …and I feel fine. Thank you.

• Nirvana - “Come as you are”
• Walt Disney’s Aladdin - “A Whole New World”
• Billy Joel - “Big Shot”
• “Weird Al” Yankovic - “Young, Dumb and Ugly”
• Pink Floyd - “Another Brick in the Wall Part 2”
• Michael Jackson - “Beat It”
• “Weird Al” Yankovic - “Eat It”
• Animals - “We’ve got to get out of this place”
• The Doors - “Roadhouse Blues”
• Young M.C. - “Bust A Move”
• Red Hot Chili Peppers - “Give It Away”
• Latour - “People are Still Having Sex”
• Jimmy Cross - “I Want My Baby Back”
• Queen - “Another One Bites the Dust”
• Five Satins - “In the still of the Night”
• Queen - “We Are the Champions”
• Phantom of the Opera - “Point of No Return”
• Whitney Houston - “One Moment in Time”
• Boyz II Men - “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday”
• Boyz II Men - “End of the Road”
• Billy Joel - “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
• The Doors - “The End”
• R.E.M. - “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”

I shake my hair as I turn the corner to walk up Chestnut St. The cool air fills me with vigor. The waves of heat and sleep that had been passing over me in the building are now gone. I feel rejuvenated, as if this weather has given me new life.

Walking in the grass, I kick one of the many cans that litters the side of the school. The metal gives a cold crinkling sound as it gives up its water within. It comes to rest at a precarious angle against the school building. I realize that it will probably be left there until it is covered with snow, and probably even after that. Most people just don’t care enough to take the time to pick it.

Walking across 11th street I begin to notice a few drops of rain beginning to fall. I think it funny that the drops are rain, and not flakes of snow. The weather is cold enough for them to start falling. Across the street I start walking into a trance. I move down the street, reflecting in this cold environment, about the day and all that happened.

“What,” I ask myself. “What did I do that was so offensive. What did I manage to do that would upset her that much. I meant well. I thought I was doing right. But what’s up Jennifer. Could you not understand what I was trying to say? Not what I said, but the underlying meaning behind it.” I notice my eyes starting to water. I would dry them, but the wind has already taken its toll and there are noting but tight spots on the skin, half way down the cheeks.

I mull over this problem for a few moments longer, agonizing about what I could have done. What I should have done. I look up out of my problems and realize that several blocks of beautiful autumn weather have gone by without my even looking at them. Standing at the corner of 9th street I look back and try to recapture what I just walked past, oblivious of it all. I realize that my hindsight is 20/20, but my remembrance of the past has clouded my vision of the future. As the tears dry up in the cruel wind, I walk across 9th street.

Half way across I am engrossed in a fantasy. I do not feel that it is likely to happen, but at this time of the year, time of change, anything is possible. I see Jennifer at the convention, recognizing her from past experiences, and think about a night on the town. We start out walking about 6 o’clock on Friday evening. We walk for a while then go to a fast food joint to get something to eat. After that excursion we get on a bus and ride around for a couple of hours. With only the bus driver and the inside lights, we can look out at the surrounding places. We look out at the dark street and wonder. After getting off, we walk back towards the hotel, but we are in no hurry. The autumn breeze whispers around the buildings, enhancing the slightly cool air. We walk around, enjoying the life that autumn has to offer. Walking under trees, and looking at the stars. We slowly, and reluctantly walk back to the hotel. At the door the blinding white light awakens me from my fantasy.

At 5th street, I now wait to cross the street. The wind blows colder as a few sample flakes fall from the sky. Through my fantasy, the fall has seemed warm and nice, but now the cold reality. Looking back to what I did not have and forward to what I will not be able to get. I run through the rest of the people that upset me like this. Amy Lee. Dana. Jasmine. Traci. Andrea. Amy. All I had made plans for at some time or another. The snow picks up more as I hit 4th street and hang a left. I realize that I have walked past the billboard of girls, and never even looked up.

Looking down 4th street, the wind picks up and the snow starts to come faster. The laugher that I hear from other groups is like the shriek of the wind. I shut them out. I walk now with my head held high. My upper cheeks molded into grotesque shapes by the frozen tears. As I cross Muhammed Ali Boulevard, I realize that I only have a little way to go. Whipping around the buildings the wind now sneers right in my face, daring me to walk into it. I look up at the three story glass giant as a savior. As I reach for the cold handle and pull open the door, I am greeting by a breath of warm air saying, “Good afternoon. Come and find what you need.”

Not because of who I was, but what I was to do, and how I was to do it. I was destined one day to rule the world, using my astounding mathematical ability.

Before I could do the math, however, I had to learn to count. That was one of the greatest challenges of my life since I was also trying to learn the alphabet at the same time. After 4 hard years my work finally paid off–I could count all of the way up to 21.

To keep the Russians from finding me, my parents made a very wise decision to send me underground. I would act like a person who could only count to 10, and go to kindergarten like a normal child.

In kindergarten the teacher told us that two plus two was four. I did not believe her. I wanted to know where the plus went. She told me to go back to my seat and believe that two plus two was four. This is what convinced me that the teacher was actually a KGB Agent sent to infiltrate my mind.

I got really irritated, so I asked them why two plus two was not three. She said that it was in 1984. This really threw me for a curve. The Russians must be really strange–she talks about 1984 in the past, when it was only Sept. 30, 1981.

I mentioned this to her and told her exactly what she could do. She complimented me on my improving vocabulary, then slapped me and sent me on to the principals office. After this I thought that I should lay low for a while. I did, until the fourth grade.

In the fourth grade our class was supposed to learn our multiplication tables. It seemed highly unlikely that I would need to know multiplication tables to use calculus–or that I would even need calculus to rule the world. Needed or not, I had to learn the tables, or face certain death by the red ink pen.

I came up with many other theories during this time to explain the actions of my teachers. Russian teachers might try to fill my brain up with so much useless information that there would be no room for higher math. They were also hoping that I would forget about my destiny, written in the stars and taken from the local newspaper, to one day be the ruler of the universe. (Well, even great people must exaggerate sometimes.)

Slowly but surely, I eventually learned my multiplication tables. Proving to her that I learned them, however, was another part altogether. We would have to recite the entire table for one number (all of the way up to 12) in 15 seconds. By now I could count, and that was not a long time.

In about nine months time I had made it through the fourth grade, and was doing quite well. My sister, however, was having a few problems. She could not figure out why, if we had nine months of school, they would not then give us nine months of vacation. The idea of there were only 12 months in a year had not occured to her yet.

Nothing that I had done up to this point, however, could prepare me for what they threw my way in the 5th grade. This year they decided that the old math was not hard enough, and so gave us new math.

Cemeral they called it. I think that they were originally going to call it cereal, but the mindless editors couldn’t spell that. They must have also written the problems. Frick and Frack and Frock are three numbers. Frock is bigger than Frack. Frick is smaller than Frack and Frock combined. All three live in a nice blue circle. Frick and Frock also live in a red circle. Their friend, Fred, does not live in the red or blue circle, but in a little yellow circle off in the distance. The only way to get to his house is to transverse the path of blue and red arrows.

Given that Frick and Frack and Frock are all contained on the number line, what is the answer to the following equation?

They would give us questions like this, and then expect us to know the answer. I don’t know the answer. Do you? So much for that. It gives me chills just to think about it. On to the great sixth grade, the very un-memorable year.

Well, not totally un-memorable. There was the one time when I won a blue ribbon at the math fair. I had this great idea about stringing yarn between nails to make a neat design. A great idea at the time, that was twisted around in my mind by the Russians.

They told me at the outset that I would have to put 400 nails into the board per night, to finish in the allotted two weeks. The good news was that the Russians told me this, so it probably was not true. The bad news was that they were right.

They figured in that time period I would have to whack my hand with the hammer several times. They tried to trick me into messing up my hands. The hands that in the future would hold the balance of the world. The hands that would keep the world from destroying itself.

They did trick me, but I amazed them. I did not once hit my thumb with the hammer. The odds of which I have found now to be approximately equal to one in infinity, give or take just a bit.

I had beaten the odds. Nothing could stop me now–except seventh grade math.

The application of everything that we had learned so far–not much. We were supposed to make a bibliographical sketch of a person and explain how they used math in their job. How many times a day does a judge use math in his job? Lets see…setting bail at $ 500,000 per rape…my, you’re going to have to pay quite a bit to get out. That’s a good example of how a judge uses math, but how about this. If I give this jay walker the death penalty, then I will have given the death penalty to 100% of the people tried in this court today. That’s a good idea.

The foreign governments thought that I would hear this and consequently go underground for fear of being caught jay walking. Just the opposite happened, however. After publishing this earth shattering report, the president had the judge thrown out of the bar. Then president would have then congratulated me, except that I went in the bar the judge just left. The police then came and arrested me for being underaged.

The teacher for some reason gave me a D- on the report. She seemed a bit upset that all of this attention came to her. Somehow the police started investigating and arrested her on child abuse charges, for making us do the stupid reports. The teacher seemed a bit perturbed as they carried her away. She was yelling something at me which sounded like it was in Russian.

So once more good triumphed over evil. It was a close call and I decided to lay low until the 9th grade year. Good thing I did too.

Ninth grade was the worst. If there was one Russian that was bent on crushing my will and spirit, it must have been she. She never even showed us her face. It seemed that we only saw her backside (Retch!). Maybe she was afraid of showing her face, thinking that our class might have discovered her true identity.

I personally thought that she was an alien, or at least that thing that was growing out of the back side of her dress. Kind of like the thing that pops of of the people on Alien. Either that or a couple of basketballs down the shorts–nothing human could be that big.

She even tried to teach our class about weird things that could only be understood by her. Take the following equation for example:

~ [ ( p · ~q ) V ( ~p V ~q ) ] · ( ~ [ ~ ( ~ [ ~ ( ~p · q ) ] ) ] )

If p is true and q is false, am I am a complete jerk for trying to understand this crap? Probably, but who really cares?

After 9th grade, the Russians figured me out–there was no way to get rid of me. The only chance that they had was to try and dispose of me.

To sum 10th grade up, their plan did not work. They did not even bother to get a real teacher, just a deranged lunatic from the local asylum. The Russians thought that she would take the first chance she had to kill me, but it misfired. Instead she took after the president, and had him disposed of. At the end of the year she was disgracefully removed to a different school, where she could be a real math teacher.

As far as this year is going, I have not seen any blatant attempts against me. Still I will be on my guard even though the iron curtain has been lifted because you never know…

On his back he wore a black Merlin T-Shirt and overlaid by an unbuttoned blue dress shirt. Tossed in the seat in front of him was his black leather motorcycle jacket. His faded blue jeans started at his waist and went on down to his Nike tennis shoes. Around his neck he wore two chains with charms of "devil's kiss" and "dragon claw holding a crystal ball." Near these chains he also had 4 necklaces of leather, strung with beads.

Through the bouncing of the bus he worked on a picture of an angel lit up by some brilliant light. When his cigarette went out he stopped his drawing and got out his lighter. After filling his cupped hand with butane, he sparked it and lit his cigarette off his burning hand. I have also heard stories that he had the ability to spew butane into his mouth and then breathe out a breath of fire.

While drawing, "Mr. Psychopath", as he prefered to be called, sang the songs of Monty Python. I heard him singing about "putting on women's clothing and hanging around in bars." After that he remarked: "Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis, isn't it quitely good to have a dong!" On a different tape he spoke of Sister Mary Eléfant and shouted out the window, for all to hear, "Hey! Let's make a dope deal!" These last two phrases, I think, were by Cheech & Chong. After no one took him up on the dope deal, he started to do the Time Warp up and down the bus aisle. All this amazed the rest of the passengers, all virgins to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

When the sugar and nicotine shock caught up with him, he covered himself up with his jacket and laid down in the seat. He started moaning and groaning about his lust for blood, and his vampirical needs to find a lover soon, finally shouting out "Group Brain Sex!" When he found no prostitutes, he returned to his noises. While bobbing around he talked about the trip he was to take next weekend, during which he was to marry a lovely, psychopathic, fourteen-year-old.

As I left him, I thought him psychotic. But he said, with a drunk grin on his face, "Not psychotic, just a psychopath. And that's 'Mr. Psychopath' to you!"

There was also a man in a business suit
Insurance was his business I think,
His hair was greased back into a tail
And his briefcase his lone companion.

In a short skirt and white shirt there was
A girl from a Catholic school. Preppie,
As all the others called her, carried a big
pack and her parents sign of money.

In the back, there was a teen blowing fire
And smoking cigarettes, and singing Monty Python.
Cheech and Chong was his groove along with
Taco Bell. He called himself Mr. Psychopath.

Hitting on the Preppie, there was a cross colors guy
Dark, and in his middle teens, he looked as if he spent a fortune
For his wardrobe did not look yet a day old.

There was also a Rent-a-Bacon along for the ride
The much despised blue uniform of the cop for hire
Cast him out of the group and so he sat by himself
And dreamed of making the rest miserable.

Toting three pieces of baggage was the single mother
On welfare and unable to find time for a job
Or a baby sitter, she sat and tried to make her kids mind
And look presentable for the rest.

An independent working woman, with her short skirt
And her brown briefcase, sat near the front of the bus
To look important and in charge. At the stop she tried
To hurry us all up and get the show on the road.

In the middle, there was a bus driver,
big and round, he did not enjoy the ride
But would rather be up in the front,
In control of the monster he is riding in.

Sitting next to the bus driver, there was a very ugly woman
Who I take to be a queer man, in woman's clothing,
These two must make a very wierd couple, indeed.

1:
The Delta Thetans sing this song
Doo-da, Doo-da
We'll serve others all day long
Oh, de doo-da day.

Chorus:
Gonna Serve all night
Gonna Serve all day
We'll learn to be great leaders too
And then we'll go and play.

2:
You come to conference without a care
Doo-da, Doo-da
You go back home with ideas to share
Oh, de doo-da day.