I need some more humor breaks lately. I am not able to bring myself to talk about some of the heaviness that seems to be whirling around me and creating obstacles for me, so here is another moment of lightness to be offered up for all to share.

Back in high school one of the interesting things about my private school was we had this event referred to as "Interim" for two weeks in the spring we would do something that would be very different from the normal events. Usually your choices were among things like taking trips (there was usually a group going to Europe for example with a teacher or two as chaperones and escorts) or have a two week intensive on special topics (at this moment I can't remember for the life of me what I did my freshman and sophomore year other than I think my sophomore year I ended up hearing more than I wanted to about Peugeots instead of whatever was supposed to be taught by that particular teacher... *shrug*)

Anyways last night there was some bit of merriment at my gaming group where I found myself quoting Ghostbusters, "Listen... Do you smell that?"

Which after spending an embarrassing moment trying remember what movie that line was from, when I did I also had a mental backtrack to a memory from my junior year Interim trip.

As Interim approached I had to make a decision about what I was going to do. My family didn't have the capability of sending me on either the Europe trip or the Caribbean trip that some of my friends were going on and I wasn't even going to ask since I knew that my parents were already working hard to afford to send me to this private school. It was sort of expected that only freshman and sophomores stay on campus during Interim so I was feeling some pressure to join on one of the trips.

A couple members of my group were in the Show Choir and mentioned to me that I could join the Show Choir trip as a Roadie. This idea was intriguing since I was already the Roadie for our garage band (I was the first one who could drive in the group *grin*) and the idea of being a stevedore didn't bother me that much. Best of all I would be with friends that I got along with and the trip was fairly economical.

I was at least friendly with almost everyone in the Show Choir since I had been involved in the yearly plays even though I wasn't a member of the Choir (the Choir was also the core group of the schools yearly dramatic presentations) and worked either lighting and/or stage prep every year (I eventually need to write about my Fairy Godmother... the first year the play was Cinderella... *wry grin*)

So here I was on a bus filled with about twenty high school kids on a tour up through the Midwest (at least it mostly wasn't parts of the Midwest I was already very familiar with *grin*). Within an hour or so of setting out from the school we were informed that there was something wrong with the bus and we would have to be transferred to another one. We pulled into a depot somewhere and offloaded from the bus while waiting for a new one to be prepared for us.

Now high school kids especially in the late 80's drank a lot of soft drinks. So inevitably there was a long line of kids waiting at the door to the single one person bathroom at this place.

Right when one of my sophomore friends was entering the tiny bathroom one of the seniors starts pushing his way through the line and enters the bathroom before my friend can shut the door behind him.

The senior shuts the door behind him.

A moment later we hear the senior saying loudly, "Don't cross the streams!"

The whole line erupts into laughter.

This same trip holds a number of interesting memories...

Like us convincing the school redneck that his naugahyde jacket was from an actual animal. (we showed him a stuffed female moose in a museum we visited and claimed it as a male nauga, and there was that herd of something we saw in the distance at one point and told him it was a nauga farm)

The family that my friend and I stayed with in Missouri who were astonished to see me with their cat on my lap while I was petting it. (evidently their cat would not allow any members of the family to be that friendly with it *evil grin* I always knew I had an animal affinity) One by one, each member of the family would wander through the living room, where I had just been sitting down when the cat had approached me and claimed my lap, and stop and stare at me in astonishment.

When we pulled up to the dinner theater in Chicago expecting to see some well known play or another and the sign had a different play on it... "Once upon a Mattress" and my young male mind was convinced it was going to be one of those risqué Broadway shows. (Damn hilarious show if you haven't seen it... I highly recommend it)

My morale outrage when the bus driver didn't stop to see if the people in the car that had passed us in the blizzard and we passed it a little while later flipped over on the side of the road were okay.

Trying to see Mount Rushmore in the beginning of same blizzard *wry grin*

Seeing the cars plugged into electrical outlets in Canada. (I had spent the first ten years of my life in the north and had visited relatives in Ontario and I didn't remember ever seeing that before. It was weird *grin*)