You may recognize the first couple of lines of this Frank Sinatra song...
No, it is much more likely that I heard the song at my grandparents house, or even on one of the many variety shows that we watched...on one of the three channels that came in clearly. But where I first heard it is not really important. What is important is that I had heard of it...and most of the teachers I worked with at the time had heard of it as well. Let me explain.
We had a new principal at our school. The first school I worked at was not lucky when it came to keeping principals. I think the front office had five different occupants in my ten years at the school. That meant that we, as a staff, were exposed to a lot of different personalities...and a lot of different strategies. (Don't worry...this will not devolve into a "teachers only" sort of story. I promise.) Along with these new people, and new ideas, we also found a lot of new ways to start a meeting at the beginning of the year. The Ice Breakers were in full force at those times.
We had Lego pieces that had to be put together a certain way, without talking. We had to go find people who had read the most, traveled the farthest, or went to the most summer trainings. Once, we even had to all hold hands, tied in a knot, and try to "untie" without letting go of our grips. It was a fun and exciting time. (does sarcasm come across in print?)
The time I am writing about today involves a song, I bet you can guess what it is! But that is not what we were told. We were broken up into teams. Each team was given an envelope with multiple slips of paper in them. Each paper had a word or a punctuation mark on it. Each team's job was to hand out a paper to every person, discover what the entire sentence said, and then stand in a line holding our papers so that everyone could read them. I liked this one! I am a wee bit competitive when it comes to intellectual things. When it comes to physical challenges I usually just cry, "UNCLE" and then curl up in the fetal position. The teams were set. We had our envelopes. GO!! Frantically we were all given a piece of paper. Everyone wanted to be the first. Secretly I hoped I would be given the linchpin to the whole sentence. You know, without me and my insight the team would just be flailing about calling out random verbs, and prepositional phrases. There, of course, would be the clue of the capitalized word. Too easy, beginning of the sentence...not for me. I want the meat of it!
I turned over my piece of paper...a dot. WHAT!?! That's it...a dot. And it was the smallest piece of paper there was too! Shouldn't they have handed them out according to height? I was disappointed. People with more interesting papers were very excited. The person who had "Ipanema" was positively strutting! That was it, the key to the whole thing...when the older members of our group saw that, it was all over but the rearranging. They didn't need me to figure it out. And I surely didn't need to be in the mix of everything since my lowly little dot was undoubtedly at the end of the sentence. My fate was set. I slowly meandered toward the end of the line and waited as they hashed out whether tall or lean came first. Others worked on the middle portion to decide where the other punctuation card, a comma, went. At least the comma had some controversy. Moved from this place to that..."No! After lovely." "Are you sure it isn't after lean!" I would, in subsequent years. have recurring dreams where I was that comma. It would be a happier time.
Ahhhhhh...but I digress.
The group, and its more seasoned members, had this. I'm not sure if the other groups were as close as ours. If they didn't have a giveaway word like "Ipanema" then they were in trouble. And then I got noticed. One of the teachers in our group looked over and noticed that I was just biding my time while I waited for the heart of the project to be done so I could slide onto the end and finish the sentence off. She was into this action and wanted the bragging rights of being the first team. When she noticed that I was off to the side, with my tiny piece of paper, she wondered if I was being a slacker. I was obviously disengaged from the group at large... and relaxed. No panic. No sense of urgency. Nothing.
Her part had already been assigned, she was in place, she caught my eye and asked, "What about your paper?"
I said three simple words...and she dropped to her knees and pounded the carpet of the school's library over and over laughing hysterically. Needless to say, that halted our progress a bit. We were still far and away the odds on favorite for this activity (Ipanema...sheesh...they may as well have not cut the paper into pieces) but I had rendered another teacher, a member of our team, out of commission due to laughter. I didn't mean to. I was just bored and I wasn't part of the action intellectually so I was going to be part of the action humorectually (it's a word, you can look it up. But it may be hyphenated.) I am happy to report that she regained control, we fell into place, and we won the competition handily...though one of our members was wiping laughter tears from her eyes.
And now I suppose I should tell you those three words. When she asked me what was on my card I simply turned it around, showed her my dot, and said, "I'm not pregnant."
Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking. And when she passes, each one she passes goes - ah.I realize that I have just settled my readers into two camps. One found it impossible not to read this, even quietly in their head, without singing it. The other group simply said, "eh?" I am just old enough, I think, to be placed in the first group. My mom is a big Sinatra fan, but I don't remember her blasting the Rat Pack leader's records on her Apple iHiFi that was the size of an over-sized bedroom dresser. (I figure everything in the future will be overrun by Apple, including the history books...so I'll just start rewriting now)
No, it is much more likely that I heard the song at my grandparents house, or even on one of the many variety shows that we watched...on one of the three channels that came in clearly. But where I first heard it is not really important. What is important is that I had heard of it...and most of the teachers I worked with at the time had heard of it as well. Let me explain.
We had a new principal at our school. The first school I worked at was not lucky when it came to keeping principals. I think the front office had five different occupants in my ten years at the school. That meant that we, as a staff, were exposed to a lot of different personalities...and a lot of different strategies. (Don't worry...this will not devolve into a "teachers only" sort of story. I promise.) Along with these new people, and new ideas, we also found a lot of new ways to start a meeting at the beginning of the year. The Ice Breakers were in full force at those times.
We had Lego pieces that had to be put together a certain way, without talking. We had to go find people who had read the most, traveled the farthest, or went to the most summer trainings. Once, we even had to all hold hands, tied in a knot, and try to "untie" without letting go of our grips. It was a fun and exciting time. (does sarcasm come across in print?)
The time I am writing about today involves a song, I bet you can guess what it is! But that is not what we were told. We were broken up into teams. Each team was given an envelope with multiple slips of paper in them. Each paper had a word or a punctuation mark on it. Each team's job was to hand out a paper to every person, discover what the entire sentence said, and then stand in a line holding our papers so that everyone could read them. I liked this one! I am a wee bit competitive when it comes to intellectual things. When it comes to physical challenges I usually just cry, "UNCLE" and then curl up in the fetal position. The teams were set. We had our envelopes. GO!! Frantically we were all given a piece of paper. Everyone wanted to be the first. Secretly I hoped I would be given the linchpin to the whole sentence. You know, without me and my insight the team would just be flailing about calling out random verbs, and prepositional phrases. There, of course, would be the clue of the capitalized word. Too easy, beginning of the sentence...not for me. I want the meat of it!
I turned over my piece of paper...a dot. WHAT!?! That's it...a dot. And it was the smallest piece of paper there was too! Shouldn't they have handed them out according to height? I was disappointed. People with more interesting papers were very excited. The person who had "Ipanema" was positively strutting! That was it, the key to the whole thing...when the older members of our group saw that, it was all over but the rearranging. They didn't need me to figure it out. And I surely didn't need to be in the mix of everything since my lowly little dot was undoubtedly at the end of the sentence. My fate was set. I slowly meandered toward the end of the line and waited as they hashed out whether tall or lean came first. Others worked on the middle portion to decide where the other punctuation card, a comma, went. At least the comma had some controversy. Moved from this place to that..."No! After lovely." "Are you sure it isn't after lean!" I would, in subsequent years. have recurring dreams where I was that comma. It would be a happier time.
Ahhhhhh...but I digress.
The group, and its more seasoned members, had this. I'm not sure if the other groups were as close as ours. If they didn't have a giveaway word like "Ipanema" then they were in trouble. And then I got noticed. One of the teachers in our group looked over and noticed that I was just biding my time while I waited for the heart of the project to be done so I could slide onto the end and finish the sentence off. She was into this action and wanted the bragging rights of being the first team. When she noticed that I was off to the side, with my tiny piece of paper, she wondered if I was being a slacker. I was obviously disengaged from the group at large... and relaxed. No panic. No sense of urgency. Nothing.
Her part had already been assigned, she was in place, she caught my eye and asked, "What about your paper?"
I said three simple words...and she dropped to her knees and pounded the carpet of the school's library over and over laughing hysterically. Needless to say, that halted our progress a bit. We were still far and away the odds on favorite for this activity (Ipanema...sheesh...they may as well have not cut the paper into pieces) but I had rendered another teacher, a member of our team, out of commission due to laughter. I didn't mean to. I was just bored and I wasn't part of the action intellectually so I was going to be part of the action humorectually (it's a word, you can look it up. But it may be hyphenated.) I am happy to report that she regained control, we fell into place, and we won the competition handily...though one of our members was wiping laughter tears from her eyes.
And now I suppose I should tell you those three words. When she asked me what was on my card I simply turned it around, showed her my dot, and said, "I'm not pregnant."
