My primary school
did a variety of bizarre and in some cases truly awful plays. Over the years I've been typecast (being somewhat on the small side) into various "ahhh isn't she cute" roles when I'd rather have done fuck all and my mum could have kept her tea towels. These included:

- for some reason, one of the "people walking around with invisible planks of wood on their shoulders while the putting-the-tent-up music from Dumbo plays".

- We also did a nativity involving a scene with the theme from The Exorcist.

- A play of Mrs Wobble the Waitress, a delightful kiddies' book about a clumsy woman who wobbles and drops everything... including soup. Onto a "customer's dog". Played by me in a ratty dog costume and made worse by the fact my mum told me "it'll be more realistic if you go 'owwwwwwww!' when the soup lands on you."

- Reciting a poem I've been unable to locate anywhere (and trust me, this is for the best) that went "bang bang bang said the nails in the ark". My bitch of an English teacher entrusted the line "and the little tiny shrew" to me, expecting me to recite it in a chipmunk voice. This did not happen.

- Being made to dress up as a priest in an Easter production of Jerusalem Joy, a lovely play about the life and death of Jebus (played by Heather, the weird kid from the year above). Then being yelled at in every rehearsal for not being able to reach the top note. Why did you give me the part, then?

- And the one I still get reminded of now: The Wizard of Oz. We did a slightly different stage version that involved, among other flagrant acts of typecasting, a then ten-year-old Maladicta cast as a munchkin (and not any munchkin, a member of the Lullaby League).

The other part was something else. You know how in the film, the witch gets pwned by a bucket of water and melts? In the original musical that our psychotic music teacher (who was only in it for the bouquets she'd get for "all her hard work") had acquired, possibly off the back of a lorry, the witch falls into a cauldron of shrinking potion she has prepared for Dorothy so she can nick the ruby slippers and destroy the universe or something like that. The witch was played by a girl in Year 11 before she went into the cauldron.

Guess who played her after she climbed out again? And who was still being referred to as "the little witch" the day she went in to pick up her A-level results?

- I wasn't allowed to be in the next production, Oliver!, because "I wasn't orphan-y enough". The only two people in the year not in the cunting play were me and Boring Sarah. Boring Sarah was boring and morbidly obese. Go figure.

Other than that, in every other cunting play, assembly and Nativity thing we did, I always had to be the fucking narrator because, as other b3tans had mentioned, I could read and some of my six-toed peers couldn't. The most memorable of these was a particularly stupid assembly about "saying goodbye" (introducing kids to the concept of death through the medium of crap puppets) called Badger's Parting Gifts. We had to read through this fucking book so many times because some of the kids involved were too thick to remember their cues that I can still quote most of it verbatim. I have an irrational urge to locate all remaining copies of the damn book and burn them.

No apologies for length, in the current economic climate I can't afford therapy.
( Maladicta, Sat 28 Mar 2009, 13:25, 2 replies)

Doggerel
The poem is called 'The History of the Flood', and the person to blame for its godawfulness is the late John Heath-Stubbs.
(Elephantine Galoot is on the M62 heading east at, Sat 28 Mar 2009, 20:59, closed)

^ I'm glad you told me that.
Now I know who to call a cunt for writing such a godawful poem. Bang Bang Bang went the book in the bin.
( Maladicta, Sat 28 Mar 2009, 23:59, closed)