Alex Lella's Blog

Memories of Ms. Stallone

So I finished the last vampire story today. I am also happy to say that it has been my first week's posting in the latest "I Write in . . ." Contest. I am really thrilled to be doing that again.

Let's see. You know, I wasn't actually planning to tell the story of Ms. Stallone, but apparently someone who commented on yesteday's entry expects it.

On the first day of Ninth grade, we all got our schedules for the year. The schedules told us what classes we were in and the last names of our teachers. Unless we happened to know, we would have to wait until the actual period to find out whether our teacher was a Mr. or a Ms. I saw that my I had Social Studies at the end of the day. And the frightening part was that my Social Studies teacher's name was "Stallone." All day long, I wondered about my Social Studies teacher. I realized that it probably wouldn't actually be Rambo, but on some subconscious level, I found myself assuming that this was a male teacher and a somewhat tough male at that.

When I got to Social Studies class, I found that I had been wrong on both points. Ms. Stallone was a petite sized, soft-spoken, rather meek woman. Through the months that followed, I learned that she was a sort of child of the sixties who wanted to teach ninth grade Social Studies because she was into all the Asian things, particularly Buddhism. In fact, just the previous year, I had first learned the word "irony" in English class. I decided that this woman had an extremely "ironic" name, and I thought it was kind of cool that irony can occur in real life like that instead of just in fiction.

I remember that year the 25th anniversary of JFK's assassination occurred and right about the same time that the older George Bush was running against Micheal Dukakis. She went into a long speech about what a wonderful person Kennedy had been. This was a little bit uncomfortable, because I didn't know that much about Kennedy as a president at that point in my life, except that he had indeed been shot, but I had heard a few other Social Studies teachers say less complimentary things about him. Then, Ms. Stallone said, "I can only hope that you one day experience a leader as great as that."

I couldn't resist saying, "Like maybe Dan Quayle?"

She let that go from me because I was actually the smart one in that class. Politics aside, she liked me because I was a sweet well-behaved boy (Usually). Most of the rest of the class acted up and took advantage of her all the time which made me feel kind of sorry for her.

Oddly, I have no memory of anyone in the class making fun of her name. That was always the elephant in the room.

Anyway, I don't know what happened to her, but the following year she wasn't at that school anymore.

Wow! How did we get into this anyway? That's right yesterday, I was reminiscing about her because it was the anniversary of the Tianaman Square massacre, which also occurred that school year.

I still have not said one word about the prompt which appears to be a fragmented dog. What is it with these prompts that they're all creepy animals?