It's cartoon time next Thursday.
--Professor Frank DeBoer, To Beth Ann Dyer's bottom
I attended school (college) in an institution affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church, and many of the students were members of that denomination, including the unwitting Isadora Duncan imitator who figures so prominently in this tale, no pun intended by the word tale/tail.
The academic standards of the college were on the whole fairly high, or at least nothing to scoff at. However, there was one particular course offering, ``Science and the Natural Order,'' an interdisciplinary offering in the natural sciences, which was banal, pathetic and intellectually humiliating. I became entrapped in that course through the politics of general education requirements, the gory details of which are gladly spared the allegedly gentle reader. The instructor who taught the course thought apparently nothing at all of making the course bear a closer resemblance to high school or even elementary school science courses. In lieu of term papers, he requested what he referred to with a perfectly straight face as ``projects,'' which could be poems, songs or skits illustrating, supposedly, some scientific principle. Following a female quartet which sang ``Amazing Waves'' (all about light waves) to the tune of ``Amazing Grace,'' there was a skit in which four leotard-clad coeds played the roles of molecules in a skit.
Though students were required to humiliate themselves academically, the physical humiliation awaiting one of the young women was entirely unplanned and unrehearsed.
She was a pretty blonde freshman whose leotard had apparently been laying around unworn long enough for it to have become several sizes too small for her. Perhaps she should have purchased another, but who would want to throw money away buying a new anything for a course with less intellectual content than a typical episode of ``Gilligan's Island''? She was being a real trooper about the whole degrading mess, bouncing cutely around and delivering lines that molecules would supposedly deliver were molecules capable of speech.
With a huge and sudden tearing sound, the leotard split all the way up the back from the crotch. There was a period of several seconds while the hundred and fifty or so people in the lecture hall tried to understand what had happened. The leotard was sleeveless, and had, instead, shoulder straps, so that the weight of the garment itself pulled the thin straps off of her shoulders, and left her standing with a basically useless leotard down around her knees. It might have been less humiliating for her had she been wearing any underwear at all, but, alas, she was not. She stood there for about a full ten seconds, with her back to the class, absolutely naked from the knees up. She bent over at the waist, striking one of the many lovely poses she was to strike for her still utterly silent audience. It took her a quarter of a minute to pull the stocking portion over her thighs and to try to slip the straps back over her shoulders.
However, the young woman, whose name will be withheld to protect the bare-bottomed, seemed destined on this day to live out what might well have been her worst nightmare back when she was in high school, and now, just when she thought it was safe to go back into the classroom, it came true. In her understandable eagerness for concealment, she broke the left strap and was only able to replace the right. She stood for another quarter minute or so, unwilling to turn around, and yet still exposed from the tops of her thighs to the top of her head. Her three partners in the skit merely stared at her, slack-jawed, as she turned and walked back to her seat in the still tomb-silent lecture hall. She was in tears and one breast was exposed. Even while taking pity on her, one part of me enjoyed the whole thing with the same sort of surrender of empathy required by comedy.
She walked to her seat, about ten feet from where I was sitting, and commenced to dig through her bookbag when the now much looser leotard, which covered nothing anyway, slipped silently once more to the floor, bunching now around her ankles and causing her to do her bending over display once more as once again she attempted to lift it up. The stocking portion barely even existed by this time, and after struggling futilely with the thing for almost three full minutes, she set here very red bare bottom down on the floor practically at my feet to attempt to remove the leotard. In her ever increasing agitation, it took her almost five minutes to remove the tangled spread of cloth, while even the instructor still had said absolutely nothing at all.
After she finally freed herself from the leotard, she stood, and now technically as well as practically naked, began digging frantically once more through her bookbag. After about two minutes she dumped the contents onto the floor, by now on the verge of hysteria. Finally one of her co-stars asked what she was looking for.
``My fucking clothes, damnit! What do you think?'' she shouted, raising herself angrily onto the balls of her bare feet and causing her bare buttocks to wobble nicely.
The co-star reminded her that after they had all changed together in a women's locker room, the one now nude had asked the one only now volunteering her reminder to hold onto her clothing, as the now nude woman had a full bookbag in which she feared her clothing would become wrinkled, while the helpful co-star had a large garment bag. That co-star now led her naked and hysterical colleague to her own seat, about five feet from where I was sitting, and dug through the garment bag, a process which took several minutes as the naked blonde's clothes would have to be at the bottom. When the helpful friend asked the helpless blonde why she had not worn undergarments, the nude freshman screamed at the top of her lungs that the leotard had fit so tightly that she could literally not fit bra and panties underneath it. She grabbed the jeans and blouse from her friend, and pulled on the jeans without fastening them and threw on the blouse without buttoning it, and began to run out of the classroom. She should have fastened her jeans because they fell down and sent her sprawling.
Finally, she ran out of the room, holding up her jeans with one hand, still leaving a couple of inches of backside showing, while holding her blouse closed with the other hand. Only then did another woman in the class get up and go after her.
The instructor merely said, ``Very interesting. Next project, please.'' Bystander apathy meets academic absurdity. Oh well.
Probably the most decadent aspect of this decadent tale is the fact that this episode was the only worthwhile thing that happened all term in that class.
Tim Scott lives in Chicago and is a graduate student in English at DePaul University. He has been involved in small press long enough to have learned how to eat contributors' copies. When not hanging around coffee houses, reading banned books, drinking cafe au lait and engaging in anti-Republican rhetoric, he is in some way or other making enough money to avoid arrest for vagrancy. Publication credits include appearances in ``Nocturnal Lyric,'' ``Pablo Lennis,'' ``Eldritch Tales,'' ``The North Branch,'' and ``The Blizzard Rambler.'' He is the Great Lakes regional editor of ``Dream International/Quarterly.''
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