Mixtapes for Hookers

When I was in first grade, my reading group put on a puppet show based on a story that we wrote ourselves; it was about a group of dogs, who were also musicians, who had to perform at the Queen of England’s birthday party.  At the end of the puppet show, the paper bag puppets performed their bit hit single, which was Belinda Carlisle’s “I Get Weak.”

(Not to take too much credit, but in retrospect I’m not sure how much of this was conceived by my reading group and how much of it was conceived by me alone.)

Anyway, over the next couple of years I wrote a whole series of stories about this band, whose name I no longer remember; at some point they morphed into humans and at another point they opened a detective agency.  My teachers were very nice about my writing habit, and occasionally had me read my stories out loud in front of the entire class.

This all came to an end when I was in third grade; my storytelling had become so common my schoolmarm-y teacher didn’t even bother to read them beforehand.  Whenever there was an extra five or ten minutes before lunch, she’d let me regale my classmates with some tale or other about a jewel heist or a really important concert.  One fateful day, I sat before the class just before recess and started reading to them a really gripping yarn about how my detectives were tracking an enemy spy through the Alps.  One of the detectives, I mentioned, was nine months pregnant.  (No one had yet informed me that very pregnant people are unlikely to put on skis, even if they are famous detective rock stars tracking a villain.  But that was just a minor detail.)

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