This reminds me of when I came to California from Md when I was 17. I was already popular in school because it was a small town and I had run away from home and hitchhiked cross country...so people were intrugued by what I had done. One of my classes was drama, and it was a double class that was held in the music room, with the seating being more of a circular 'bleacher' type seating that circled the room. The first day of the semester, which was when I arrived, the teacher wanted each of us to tell a joke or a story to break the ice since many people were new to the class. This was my first day in a new school and when I got there I sat alone, not one person said a word to me. The girls didn't notice me, and I felt like a wart on a log.
When my time came to break the ice, I decided to tell a joke...but to elaborate on it and use real events from my teen years in Maryland to mask the fact that I was actually telling a dumb joke - not letting anyone be the wiser until the punchline at the end. It was entirely off the cuff, and I had everyone's attention for about 20 minutes, just telling this "extended" joke, with small anecdotes and humor laced into the real part of the story. Any outside noises were hushed by other classmembers, and the teacher sat there as if I was giving a lecture.
I don't know what came over me, or why I was able to do this, because just a mere week earlier I was a scared, skinny, depressed teenager fearing that his father was out to get him and hurt him. I ran because I was tired of looking over my shoulder, and tired of pretending that I was happy. Numerous times, I had climbed over a railing of a bridge thinking about jumping, but climbed back because I was more afraid of failure than I was of success. But that day, I was in the spotlight and enjoyed making those people laugh and knew I was going to make friends. When I got to the punch line, people were laughing, some shaking their heads because it really was a stupid joke, but they knew that I had them the entire time.
By the end of class, I found myself sitting with a few others who had decided to move and sit near me. Two girls in the class, both cheerleaders, told the teacher they wanted to do their skits with me, and the kid who had the lead in the upcoming senior class play told me that he was learning two parts, and thought I would be better for the lead than he was. The teacher stopped me at the end of class and told me, "you really won them over", and smiled in approval. For the next couple weeks I did all my skits with the cutest girls in the class, and they fought over who got to do a skit with me next. I was transformed from scared to confident, shy to outgoing, and a loner to being popular. All because of a scary story I told about the back woods of Maryland laced with a dumb joke.
I didn't stay long at that school, though. My uncle, whom I was staying with, decided to send me back home to Md., to the same person I was running from in the first place, and within a month I was gone. Ahhh...to be young again....that was 30 years ago...and I remember it like it was only 3 decades ago!
