My Eighth Grade Talent Show

In eighth grade, I was kind of friends with a girl named Catherine. She was really fat (4'8" and 170 pounds) and used to wet her pants almost every day, prompting her to be nicknamed, so originally, Smelly. Also, her house was out in the country and she only had well water so her poly-cotton uniform shirts, which should have been white, always looked like someone had blown nicotine through them.

We had to wear a uniform because we went to a horrific catholic school called St. Peter's. When we had the occasional visitor from a rival catholic school on our bus, they used to call us peter eaters. The principal was a nun named Sister Mary Paul. She looked like a shriveled up turd with a tissue draped over it. In fact, my best friend at the time, a kid named Vic, composed the following song about her:

Sister Mary Paul
She's the principal (pronounced "prin-ci-paul for rhyming reasons)
She has a head
Like a turd ball

The teachers in the school consisted of an anorexic teacher who cut her hair super short, a teacher named Mrs. Dunne who used to be a nun but wasn't any more although she wore black all the time and lumbered down the hallways like a Sherman tank, and an alcoholic teacher whose maiden name I forget but who got married halfway through my seventh grade school year. Her married name was Gottslitsch, pronounced "gots-lik", which inspired my friend, Vic, to inquire, when she got back from her honeymoon, "So, did you crotch lick Mr. Gottslitsch?"

Vic didn't get in trouble for that, or anything else he did, because his father died of a heart attack when he was in second grade. Vic basically lived at my house, and after he ate dinner with us for about three years my dad looked up from his paper, which he always read at the table, and said, pointing at Vic "Who the hell is that kid?"

My dad's powers of observation were not the greatest when it came to our house, and we could often acquire pets and keep them for at least six months before my dad would notice them, including a German Shepard, a rabbit named Bunnicula, a cat, a goldfish, and my chameleon, which I used to let out of his aquarium all the time, and which my dad once sat on when Charlie, the chameleon, was running around on the sofa.

That day I searched all over the house for Charlie trying not to disturb my dad, who was reading the paper, and when my dad finally got up I saw Charlie squished into the cushion of the sofa. He was all black but still alive. I taught him to jump through a plastic hoop and do other tricks and he was a great pet until I got the idea, that in retrospect was not very smart, to introduce him to my cat, who promptly bit Charlie’s head off. I buried him in a Sucrets box. The cat's name was Grover after the sesame street monster, whom I grew to love from the book "the monster at the end of this book".

So my final year there, eighth grade, St. Peter's decided to have a talent show. I of course had to be in it. Despite lacking any talent, I decided I would choreograph a dance to the song "Romeo" from “Flashdance.” I had just seen the movie and thought it was the greatest. Of course, Catherine had to be in the show too, dancing with me, as I didn't want to dance by myself because I was quite shy. How else to explain the fact that I would put myself on stage with a big fat girl who wet her pants and was nicknamed Smelly? The talent show was to be held the day before our weeklong spring break.

What prompted me to think I could choreograph a dance? Well, I had taken ballet when I was age 5 through 7, although I never got any better during the year and the adults in the room used to laugh at me. This could also have to do with the fact that my mom never bought me real ballet tights so I had to wear these horrible thick cable knit tights that we wore with our uniforms during the winter because we couldn't wear pants and instead had skirts and had to go on the playground even if it was -20 degrees. I usually put them under my leotard, so my ass looked big and puffy with cable marks. Catherine was trying to lose weight with a Richard Simmons dance video, so I figured we were set with enough dance experience to win the show.
We practiced the dance for all of two hours the day before the show. Every time we did the dance we did new moves because we could never remember the moves we had choreographed. The grand finale was a tricky move called "over the rainbow," that I had recently seen performed in the movie cannery row. It's a pretty difficult dance move but in the soggy grass in my back yard it didn't seem too hard.

One of the main goals of being in the talent show was to get the attention of a kid named Dean Corbollotti, who was a totally hot guy even though after lunch he always had pieces of apple stuck in his braces. I thought he would see me dance and want to go out with me. I used to think Dean was flirting with me when he would come up to me on the playground and push me to the ground. In hindsight, I think he was just a big dick.

So the day of the show arrived. Since Catherine was so fat the only clothes besides her uniform that she had to wear was a pair of bright purple sweatpants. I had just gotten a horrific lilac polyester tracksuit with two white stripes down the side of the pants from Sears, courtesy of one of my mom's apparently drunken shopping sprees, so we decided these would be our costumes. The pants to my tracksuit were two and a half inches too short for me because I was very skinny and things that fit my leg length usually were too big in the waist. Why no one took pictures, I don't know, but how I wish I had them now.

The talent show was held in the basement of the school, where they also held church services. The stage was the cleared-off altar of the church, a big wooden platform. They were building a new church next door to the school and my brother Bob actually had the honor of being the first person to throw up in it, which he did by leaning over a pew and puking into some woman's purse and all over her coat the day the church opened. The talent show required us to supply our own tape for our music, so the night before the show I had held an old tape recorder next to a speaker on my record player to tape the song “Romeo" from the Flashdance album. You could hear my sister singing along in the background.

We started out with our little intro dance moves that consisted of an elaborate machination of "patty cake". I was pretty good at the little hand moves as I used to do them with the only black girl at our school whose name was Kerstie. Kerstie was on welfare and had a glass eye that didn't quite fit her so it was always rolling off to one side of her head. She used to pop it out and wash it off in the drinking fountain. No one else would touch her or talk to her so I played with her on the playground and sometimes we skipped rope. So Catherine and I spent the first 15 seconds of the song doing the patty cake routine, then we started hopping up and down and knocking our tennis shoes together.

I realized, as the refrain for Romeo was starting and only 30 seconds into our dance routine that we were losing our audience. So I stage whispered to Catherine "over the rainbow! now!" This dance move required me to do a handstand against Catherine's back, so we were butt to butt, my head facing towards the floor. Then Catherine was supposed to grab my ankles and dropped to a squat, pulling my legs down as she went down. When my knees were completely bent over her shoulders and my feet touched the ground I would then fall forward onto my hands and somersault over landing on my feet. Or so the theory went.

One thing we had not taken into account is that we had practiced on soft grass. Catherine, in her nervousness at being on stage, dropped down pretty quickly after grabbing my ankles and launched me over her head before my feet could touch the ground. I fell forward on my wrists slamming hard against the wooden floor. Pain began reverberating up my arms. I was sure they were both broken. As the audience laughed I rolled over onto my side and then somehow managed to crawl behind the curtain and off the stage. I sat in a stair well for a half hour and cried.

In the end, the contest was won by a girl named Dawn Fritzinger, who went on to compete in Ms. US Teen and is probably a soccer mom now. She did a routine to “Beat it” and with her years of gymnastic and dance experience won over the audience immediately. I on the other hand suffered grave damage to my ego when, for the rest of the year, I was teased about my foray onto the big stage.

I don't know whatever happened to Catherine, but, in ninth grade, her brother shot himself in the head with an elephant- hunting gun his father had left laying around the house. True story.