Abraham Lincoln School - Part Two, The Kid's Summer Talent Show

The escapades of Hank Johnson in Hell on Earth, a love story, begin for the most part with him going off to college because that is where he made most of the mistakes affecting his sentence. Before that, he was a pretty average kid doing pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. Earlier, in Abraham Lincoln Playground – Part One, I wrote about our activities when we weren’t being supervised. In Part Two, I take a look at some of the more structured activities.
The Abraham Lincoln summer school program consisted mostly of craft activities that involved making and painting plaster of Paris plaques.
We did the fruits—apples and pears, the presidents—Washington and Lincoln, and the historic events—the Last Supper. We did these and then we would do them again. And when we weren’t doing those we did ashtrays, which you could never have too many of back in the days when both parents smoked from dawn to dusk without ever giving a moments thought to cancer or the dangers of secondary smoke.

I’m sure we did other activities but none come to mind. What does come to mind is the way each summer’s summer school program ended. It was the great, open-to-all-comers, free for all, Abraham Lincoln Summer School Program Kid’s Talent Show. A kid’s talent show in the 50’s meant you’d be lucky to find a parent in the building.

There were three categories—song, dance and other—and musical accompaniment was probably limited to a piano.

Generally I didn’t enter the talent show, preferring instead to sit in the audience and toss wisecracks at those brave enough to perform, but one year was different.

Waiting for the Other Shoe to Fall

Life is all about waiting for the other shoe to fall and getting out of the way before it hits you. The first shoe is just the set-up—the act of a straight man and who ever remembers the lines of the straight man?

The second shoe is the punch line and is accompanied by a drum roll. Battaboom!

A fire alarm went off the other night while my wife and I were staying in the Emily Morgan Hotel across the alley from the Alamo. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a warning that the Mexican army was back in town but I was absolutely positive that there wasn’t a fire. That’s because I, like most people, have a long history of dealing with fire alarms going all the way back to my early days at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School. And the thing is, there is never a fire, it is always a drill.

"Trees" by Joyce Kilmer and me

I wasn’t always a writer of prose. There was a short time a very long time ago when I wrote poetry—damn good poetry.

I was reading a book about the Appalachians, which had a chapter about the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest—the only never-logged woodland in all of Appalachia. The naming of this choice natural treasure was obviously inspired by Kilmer’s famous poem, “Trees.”

Reading the story of the forest, Kilmer and the poem reminded me of an incident that happened more than 50 years ago when I was in the third grade at Abraham Lincoln School in Irondequoit, New York.