The title may be exaggerated for dramatic effect
This summer I was feeling existential and nervous that when I’m an adult, I’ll forget small things I enjoyed or thought were funny in everyday life. So, I started writing down a summary of memorable moments from each day of summer. I think I got up to the middle of July when I stopped writing in it, but the stuff I wrote I read back and am glad I did. Long story short I am going to describe some of the top memorable moments from High School so far mostly for me so that when I am old I can read this again and remember.
I will begin by telling a story of something that happened just this year. I don’t ever really talk about it, but I’m involved in the Show Choir here. I don’t know if people knew about it, but we host our own competition every year called Clash where it pretty much takes the entire school because we use a bunch of rooms for each choir that comes, we have to give them a place to warm up, we use the cafeteria, etc. Obviously, it’s on a random Saturday in February, so we take the Friday to set up and we tear it all down Saturday around midnight after the competition finishes. To get it done as fast as possible, people are assigned to different rooms and because I’m a senior (I guess), I was assigned to be the “Band Room Riser Supervisor” so right before the final awards ceremony, I head over there to get it started. The band room was the warm-up room, so we had one set of not-so-great quality risers (which are pretty much just super wide stairs) set up with our old, rickety, wooden stairs on the side (we had to use all of our nice equipment for the actual performance stage).
All of the risers were put away, so all we had to do now was put away the stairs. They go in a closet in the small cafe on a pretty high shelf. I had done it before so I grabbed a few other people to help me carry them to the small cafe and then get them back up on the shelf. Here is the floorplan of the closet- it will be important later.
It was a tiny closet. Anyway, we get to the door, drop the heavy stairs, and probably pull out a bunch of splinters from my fingers. I pull open both doors and it looked like a completely different room.
I’m not kidding three different chairs, a three-cushion couch, an AREA RUG, a MINI FRIDGE, and a TV (it was off so I think it was just for show but still)!!!! I looked at the shelf where the stairs went and they had piles of granola bars, fruit snacks, and other snacks sitting there. And at least four tech crew members looking confused. I couldn’t talk for probably like thirty seconds until I asked them what they were doing there. They literally said, “Can’t you tell?” and looked at me as if I was the crazy one. I asked them if they knew what time it was and that we were going to have to start tearing down and using the closet they had moved into. They answered by saying something about how before the show choir started at North, the closet used to belong to the tech crew so it’s okay if they were in there or something. Like, I don’t care about the alleged long-standing turf war against us and the tech crew, all I wanted was to put away these stairs that have probably been sitting in this closet for ten years. None of these people went to the school when we “stole” the closet. A few of the other people I brought with me just started arguing with them. I just said to them “Alright, guys you just have to get out of here honestly” and unsurprisingly they did not move a single muscle. I ended up having to ask the senior tech crew ringleader to make them move and I’m pretty sure he just snapped and they started moving out. They did give me a Capri Sun so I can’t be too mad.
Alison and I were talking about our AP Lang class last year and we both agreed that a memory I’m about to talk about is definitely something we’ll remember after high school. So I think we were just about to read the book The Awakening by Kate Chopin and, as many of you probably already know, water is a major symbol in the novel. So, Mr. Burns gave us an assignment where we had five minutes to come up with some type of symbolism of water. To be honest, we spent probably four of the five minutes not doing anything so when he gave us a warning that we were presenting soon, we started racking our brains on what to put on the slides. I had just watched Frozen 2, so we came up with the idea that we could talk about the main idea of frozen- that water has memory because it has gone through its cycle millions of times. We figured just talking about Frozen wouldn’t be enough, so we agreed that Alison would try to find any type of scientific proof or research that water actually did have memory and I would talk about Frozen 2 since it was pop culture.
As we were scrambling to finish, he told everyone to put our hands up and stop typing. I scrolled through our slides and noticed that our title slide was actually unfortunately complete garbage.
Luckily, he then proceeds to call on us to go first and I’m pretty sure I said “Please no” and asked if he could give us a few more minutes while another group goes. Since the presentations
were extremely informal, he just made us go. When our title slide was projected up on the smart board, he just read all of the text on the slide, exactly how it was spelled with a straight face. He then changed the slide and told us to start speaking.
This was Alison’s slide and if I remember correctly, she just read the slide out pretty much verbatim and with minimal context. I don’t blame her for two reasons. 1) this research makes absolutely no sense to anyone who doesn’t actually take the time to read the article in full (which we didn’t) and 2) my half of the presentation was considerably worse.
He changes the slide and this comes up :
I just started aimlessly explaining the entire plot of Frozen Two, feeling increasingly dreadful with each word I said. I looked over at Alison and I think she had her head down on the desk and her shoulders were shaking like she was trying to laugh quietly. I don’t know how long I talked, but I know I pretty much just said a whole lot of nothing and this would go down as one of my top embarrassing moments.
If you feel compelled to comment on this post, please share one of your unforgettable moments.
Lauren G,
I did not have a clue that you were in the show choir program here at Naperville North. For how well I know you, you tend to not talk about it at all. The title of being assigned the “Band Room Supervisor” is actually pretty lit. That is a big room and probably takes years of experience to understand what to do with a room that big. Also, the floor plan that you provided is very helpful because then I can visualize what I am looking at. Ok, what the turf war is crazy. When did Show Choir start at North? Like over 10 years ago? How are the current tech crew members aware of the turf that could have been once theirs over a decade ago? Makes no sense to me. I REALLY liked your talking about that one time in AP Lang. This was one of the top 3 moments in Naperville North High School for me. Reading this I was just laughing out loud remembering how funny that moment was. Afterward, I remember Mr. Burns being actually surprised that there was meaning behind talking about the plot of Frozen 2. I also remember looking around the classroom and realizing that everyone else was also laughing at us, maybe not even at us but with us because it was actually funny stuff.