In which our teacher dresses like a clown...and loses her shit.

Devil’s night! Mischief night! The excitement is palpable and I’m coming out of my skin!

Photo from my beloved bottle of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's Devil's Night.

                                                      

I have one last day of work here at school before Halloween, my most favorite day of the year! Added to this ado is the fact that teachers and students alike are parading around in costumes! While I was walking through the courtyard on my way to lunch, relishing the chill October air, my strange heart swelled to see the least lame of the student body and faculty donning witches’ hats and vampiric capes. It was all so magical!

I was lost in the excitement of it all when I caught a little something nagging at my brain: Costumes!? Teachers!? R’uh R’oh!

Yes, with such excitement and well-mannered frivolity* comes a grave, grave potential for disaster. Let me start by saying that teachers in costumes are normally the best! It’s so jarring, yet delightful to see your duteous pedagogue set so firmly outside his or her normal role and setting. However, teachers in costumes could also go very, very wrong. Back in the seventh grade, I suffered through a costumed teacher experience so ignominious, so abhorrent, that my blood runs cold to this day expecting its return.  

The main player in this seventh-grade living nightmare was my math teacher, Mrs. Stoddart. Ole Stoddart was a tiny old math teacher, but she surely packed an acerbic punch. Mrs. Stoddart was the type of teacher you simply didn’t mess with, despite her little old lady stature. She could silence a classroom with a mere look – a piercing gaze magnified by thick, outdated glasses and severe, angry eyebrows.

Mrs. Stoddart ruled over her 8^th grade pre-algebra class with an iron, yet arthritic, fist. She governed from atop the towering stool that eternally stood next to her beloved overhead projector on its raised cart.

I can’t remember Mrs. Stoddart not sitting on that stool, effecting the fancy that the overhead projector had grown out the side of her torso. But this anomaly pales in comparison to my most remarkable memory of Mrs.  Stoddart - the most vivid memory of my entire middle school experience, which has been inexorably burned into my consciousness.

It happened on Halloween.

The day dawned with Excitement! Thrill! Costumes! Nowadays, my district bans masks, weapons, and anything remotely creative, scary, tactless, thought provoking, or that may have shared a room with a peanut in its entire existence.* But back in the good ole 90s, such overcautious safeguards were not yet imagined. And so, my middle-school hallway boasted a real knife-wielding Michael Meyers, a Grim Reaper with a scythe that glinted with edge, and countless extremely vulgar President Bush masks.

As I maneuvered from English class to Math class, my 13-year-old self rejoiced in all of the creativity and celebration cramming the hallways. As I walked into Mrs. Stoddart’s room, I wasn’t particularly thinking about her, or math, or whether she might be wearing a costume. I walked in, lost in the delight of the day, and skidded to a stop when I saw a clown crouched on that infernal stool alongside the overhead projector.  

For a reason that mystifies me to this day, Mrs. Stoddart had chosen to dress as a repulsive clown for her middle-school math class in celebration of Halloween. And I don't do so well with clowns.

Ole’ Stoddart hadn’t opted for some half-assed wig and cheap, foam red nose either. No, no - Mrs. Stoddart had procured full-on Barnum-and-Bailey quality clown regalia here: a thick, hefty frizzy rainbowed wig; an indecent plastic, devil-red nose; and offensively large shoes, the color of mustard. Garish discolored pom-poms stood in a column down her torso atop the blue, white and yellow striped jumpsuit that clothed her body. My brain won't even let me recall the details of that ruffled collar, which rivaled that of 17th century royalty.

And the makeup. A full face of impenetrable greasepaint. White cream as thick as the cholesterol in my arteries clouded any semblance of Mrs. Stoddart I could detect. Her mouth was outlined, in an exaggerated and twisted manner, in the forgery of a smile, blood red filling the interior. And her eyebrows! She actually thought it necessary to exaggerate her already severe eyebrows further with pitch-black grease pencil formed into hulking pointed tee-pee shapes.

It was terrifying, and became more so when a smile emerged from under the mask of makeup. Mrs. Stoddart didn’t smile. This was surely evil incarnate.

To this day, I still don’t know if her intent was to delight or terrify us; I chose to be terrified. Being a good student, however, I just smiled, mumbled “Happy Halloween” and shakily scurried to my seat, skirting the circumference I thought her arms could reach lest she decide to reach out, grab me, and drag me back to the putrid Pagliacci-filled pit from whence she must have emerged.

I soon discovered that being taught algebra by a clown is very unnerving. 

Understandably, we reacted badly to the whole scenario. Instead of using the period for muted Halloween festivities as most teachers did that day, Mrs. Stoddart actually chose to teach algebra like it wasn’t even a holiday. Like she wasn’t even dressed like a clown. Everything was weird and off-kilter. And thus, the class became uncharacteristically ill-behaved. Our uncomfortable chattering and horseplay was like the rising tide. Mrs. Stoddart’s constant yelling* at us to “pipe down” failed. While her admonitions temporarily stalled the flow, our rebellious, uncomfortable reaction eventually became unstoppable, what with it being the only way we had to fight back this living horror.

And then...

I don’t remember exactly what the straw was that broke the camel’s back, but I do remember that Brian Mangus finally did something to elicit the full force of that ever-simmering teacher ire.

And, so, Mrs. Stoddart reamed us the hell out. Dressed like a clown.

She slammed her wet-erase marker down onto the projector’s glass surface, startling us out of our mesmerism. Then Mrs. Stoddart did the unthinkable. She detached from the overhead projector, climbed down off the stool that I was sure, until that moment, was fused to her ass, and walked over to more closely address the main offender.

I stifled a gasp at this surprising turn of events and watched as her giant yellow shoes impeded any sense of dignity she might have left. My compassion poured out to our poor, now mute class comedian. We all looked away, sympathetic, yet privately thanking the heavens it wasn’t us who found themselves now so very intimate with a clown.

Breathing a sigh of relief when her flow of vitriol ebbed, I thought the show was over and we could all get on with the rest of our lives. But, there was no stopping Mrs. Stoddart. She was on a roll. Ole' Stoddart toddled back to her overhead pulpit, clambered onto her throne, and revived her fervor to ensure we knew we were all to blame for this tantrum.

Her red nose bobbed as that enlarged, gruesomely painted pie-hole distinctly formed each word detailing how terrible we were behaving. How we were the worst class she ever taught. How we were bad at math! We sat silent, shell-shocked, mouths agape. Now that her fury wasn’t directed solely at Brian Mangus, now that the clown’s ire fanned out like confetti from a cannon to all of us, I felt shamed. I was mortified that I had helped to make this clown so angry. What kind of person makes a clown angry?   

The whole time as I listened to words like “failure,” “disappointment” and “recreants,” I wondered Why did this have to happen today? Mrs. Stoddart, while stern, never really blew up before. It would have been easier to swallow on any other day. But why today? Why such intensity? Why in that outfit?

She wasn’t even coming up for air when the bell rang. We dismissed ourselves, too wary to wait for a formal dismissal from this angry, accursed clown. I’ve never seen 30 teenagers move so quickly, faces ashes, mouths silent.

It was all so terrible. And so delightful. An angry clown yelling at you, in a profoundly sincere manner, is probably the worst indignity in life anyone could ever suffer.

That day really was the worst of my life. And although countless teachers have inspired me to get into the profession - including the non-clowned Mrs. Stoddart herself – I have surely developed a complex about being too festive in the “costume” department on Halloween at school. I live with the fear that history may repeat and I may find myself losing my shit and berating a class while dressed as Beetleguise, a sexy banana, or Madonna.

And there’s just no recovering from that; that’s just the type of shit that could give somebody a serious complex. 

Post Script (after the jump):

Mrs. Stoddart was, in actuality, a lovely woman, an accomplished educator and a beloved teacher throughout her decades of teaching.  

I believe my brain may have exaggerated this story slightly since the twenty-some years these events occurred. To be fair, I don’t even think Mrs. Stoddart was that old, but the stained hands and the projector-exaggerated eyebrows were totally true. I’m also fairly certain her costume wasn’t as gruesome as I remember, but, you see – I’ve got this thing with clowns. And after all, as my beloved Washington Irving once quipped, “I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.”

* Did you know that yelling at students is called “redirecting” nowadays?

* I know this is a serious allergy. I apologize for poking fun.

* I realize I plagiarized this line. Giving credit to Harry Potter.