Do you know Suzanne from My Dang Blog? No?? Please do yourself a favor, and run to her site right now! (well, you can wait until finishing this post, but I won’t hold it against you if you don’t)

Today, Suzanne was talking about a presentation she had to prepare during her university years, that ended with a weird twist. Even after cutting the presentation short, Suzanne still got an ”A”.

That reminded me of a project I had to do, back in my college years…

Before telling you about it, I have to say that I was a very good student. As a kid I was probably considered the teacher’s pet, and I always put much efforts in my homework and school presentations.

Until that day, in college, when our French teacher announced that we would have to prepare a scene, from a Québec classic theater play, in groups of two or three students.

My mistake was to team up with two good friends of mine… They both were really cool, and we always had much fun together. But, they certainly didn’t share my enthusiasm about giving a good performance and getting good grades. To say the truth, they didn’t care about the assignment.

At all.

We had a couple of weeks to get ready, and I knew other teams were working hard on finding costumes, and learning their parts by heart… In the meanwhile, the three of us barely made a couple of readings of our scene together, when one of my friends had a brilliant idea.

It was about time… The presentation was due the next day, and we hadn’t done anything.

Ok, so here’s the plan… You two will attend the class tomorrow, and I’ll call in sick. If the team is missing one person, Mr Idon’trememberhisname can’t make you play the scene… It would be absurd!

Not as absurd as thinking we could get away from the assignment just because one of us was sick, I’ll give you that! But at that time, we didn’t think any further, and decided it was perfect.

So… The next day, the two of us showed up and our mastermind stayed home.

Everybody in the class gave their performance, and we were called in, at last. (I have a feeling Mr Idon’trememberhisname had noticed that our accomplice was missing, and had decided to keep us for dessert)

As planned, we pleaded that we just couldn’t do the scene with a teammate missing. And in all honesty, we probably showed better acting skills trying to get away with the assignment, than we would have actually doing our scene.

Mr Istilldon’tremember gave us the benefit of a doubt, and told us we could come to his office the next day, to give our performance…

Dang!

An emergency meeting took place that night, and the brainstorming was more or less impressive. Playing the ”sick” card again was eliminated right away. We had to come up with something… Quick.

What about a puppet show??

I know, you’re probably thinking ”what?? puppets??”, but all three of us got really excited about the idea. We agreed, the emergency meeting ended, and we went back home.

The next day, Mr What’shisnamedangit was waiting for us in his little office. I wish someone had filmed his reaction, when we walked in and kneeled down to hide in front of his desk. Crouching, we each held a hand up, and prepared to give him our ”performance”.

The only puppet I had found overnight was a wrinkled puppy (you might remember them)

 

The guy who had pretended to be sick, was more ”creative”… He had nailed a stick in a tennis ball and used a small plastic bag as a ”body”.

But the really absurd part was that my other friend hadn’t found anything, So he had just his bare hand sticking out a little like this…

 

 

Needless to say that we hadn’t memorized the scene, so we passed the book around to read our lines. It probably gave a little extra charm to our lovely puppet show…

There was no reaction when we ended our presentation. I was expecting either laughter (less likely) or some shouting, but our teacher kept silent. We stood up, and he excused us, without more feedback.

Looking back, I felt bad. I had never taken an assignment so lightly before, and I was a bit ashamed of myself. I was going to fail for the first time, and I deeply regretted not taking this seriously.

Until I got my review… Mr Whatever had given me the passing grade, with a short note that basically said

You guys have balls!