corknut | Of botched lines, flying monkeys, and ewoks: high school language class plays.

There was an ewok in my desk a couple of weeks ago. Winnie the Pooh sat next to me in class, and behind me, on a clothes horse, hung Cinderella's dress, a Jedi warrior robe, and Aladdin's magic carpet. Strangely, I wasn't delusional.

In our school, French/Spanish I and II levels have their annual language plays in the spring. French/Spanish levels III, IV, and V have theirs in the fall. I am in French III. Our class did Beauty and the Beast. I was a narrator, had only one line, and thus got to spend most of the time watching the insanity unfold. It was awesome.
In an effort to include everyone in the class, Madame had to assign more than one person to the big parts (Belle, the Beast, etc.)- thus making scene changes absolute hell. Especially because the three/four Belles were all sharing one dress (um, wearing it over their clothes). I believe at one point Madame actually had to explain that to the audience; they were taking so long. And the parents were all, Oh, yeah. We know. We've been through three years of this.
To make things more crazy, we didn't do such a great job preparing for this play. Most of the class was pretty shaky on their lines (yeah, me and my one line included- sad really), and this lead to some really awkward scenes with the actors just standing there, not really knowing what to say, before shuffling awkwardly offstage, effectively skipping half the scene. I heard stories of French IV kids who, when the forgot their lines, just randomly started spewing out nonsense in French that probably, translated to English, sounded something like, "Do you bicycle in pool yesterday is red?" "Oh yes, I love the snowboarding camera!"
Perhaps the strangest scene in our play was when Belle is chased through the woods by wolves (aka chased across the front of the classroom by sophomores holding paper wolves-on-a-stick). Instead of getting his wolf, Gabe (maybe accidently, maybe not- I'm betting not) grabbed one of the flying monkeys from French IV's Wizard of Oz play and used that instead. So Belle was chased by three wolves and a flying monkey. Enough said.
Yeah. So. That's about it. And we're doing it all again next year.
... I can't wait.

(Just in case you were wondering, the (stuffed) ewok and the Jedi robe were from a French IV Star Wars play, the Cinderella dress was used by the Belles in our play, Aladdin's carpet was from French IV's Aladdin, and the Winnie the Pooh... he wasn't for anything. He usually just randomly sits on top of the cabinet next to my desk.)