In my previous post:
https://laughingatsid.wordpress.com/2024/02/05/southwest-mississippi-christian-academy-the-school/
I discuss the history and the physical plant of Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy. The school is stereotypical of several private schools in my resume of schools such as Clifton Ganus, Valley Forge North, Valley Forge Central, and Mississippi Baptist. The school was unique in that it was the mostest redneckest of the bunch. I still chuckle at the memory of it and myself, and I hope you do as well.
This was the year I learned that it is easier to make friends with the bad kids in the class. This was probably the high point of my growing prowess as the class clown. I will probably discuss my coping mechanisms for the “New Kid Syndrome,” but for now, I just want to tell some funny stories.
General Assembly:
We had a general assembly once a week. Each week, a class did the program. I don’t recall we ever had a chapel meeting even though we were a Christian school. Somehow, they all began to devolve into lip-synching popular songs. I laugh at the girls rushing the stage when Robbie Stinson did a perfect, “Hunk a hunk of burning love.” Old Elvis gets the chicks every time. My claim to fame was doing “Last Kiss” by J. Frank in the Cavaliers. Pearl Jam later did a cover of it, and I think they were such lightweights compared to me. I nailed it! I was later told they were afraid the chicks would rush the stage, and they closed the curtains quickly. Once again, I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory!
Lest you think I am really old, the song was old when I nailed it.
A bad deal:
This was in the 3″B”‘s of education era; “Bust their Butts with a Board.” Teachers in that time had dungeons with whips, and chains, and handcuffs hanging all over them. Cross them, and they would cross your eyes with pain. Occasionally, I see some Facebook posts where someone is reminiscent of these good old days. They obviously didn’t have the same pain tolerance I had. I don’t have any fond memories of that pain.
Teachers had wooden paddles that were a 1 X big enough to hurt. In a special combination of physics, sadism and a perverse need to mark their territory they would drill their names in holes in their paddle. This had the combined effect of better aerodynamics and more detailed scaring on both your posterior and your psyche. Your reward for enduring that moment of crippling pain was that you got to sign the paddle.
Coach Felder, who was both a coach and a math teacher, and not particularly very good at either, sauntered into class with a new paddle with “FELDER” just glaring right at you. He announced the caveat that you got the right to sign the paddle if he signed your butt with said paddle. Being one with a compulsive need to make a scene, far outweighing my small brains ability to think with a twinge of common sense, jumped right up to snatch immortality in exchange for a concave buttocks. Two other of my dumbest and morally depraved fellow classmates popped up like lambs to the slaughter.
Surely, I had wingmen, and the confidence that he wouldn’t hit that hard since it was voluntary, and in jest.
MAN! WAS I WRONG!!! He hit me so hard, one eye was staring at the pencil sharpener, while the other was looking across the road at some blurry cow in a field. I heard the exultation of the angels, along with the tortured screams of tormented souls being drug down a chute to the pit. As my fillings popped out and poisoned my gut with mercurial amalgam, one of my two brain cells gave up the ghost and fell over with a dull thud in my hollow head. I still believe that I have bruising and scaring, which I affectionately call “Felder Ass,” which coincidentally was my future designation for said teacher.
I signed the paddle with shaking hand. This was a totally Pyrrhic victory on my part. I think somewhere I can imagine him cackling with a fond memory of his actual victory. What I find ironical is that in today’s generation of cell-phone-equipped internet justice warriors, such violence would be met with more comments that a kid falling in a gorilla cage or a Cecil the lion shooting dentist. For me, it brought back a phrase I refer to as Grandmother’s saying. I could still envision her with tears in her eyes saying, “Sid, don’t be a jackass!!!”
Up next, Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy: More Stories.
Laughing@Sid 