hello

Spatulas
So this is the beginning of Cammii and Shawn's adventures in Jr.High. I will be writing from Cammii's perspective. This little insert happens to be in stage crew. Stage crew is the behind the scenes in the drama department. We paint sets; we make and display posters and advertisements for shows. We do the actors make-up...we make everyone else look good. It was the seventh grade and right after our annual production, Scream III. The walls of the cafetorium were decorated with black wallpaper and various kinds of pumpkins, witches, and other spooky Halloween things.

Halloween was over though and so was the show, and as stage crew we were assigned clean up duty. We had made the decorations so now we had to take them down. Shawn and I were assigned to take off all the black paper on the wall. It seemed pretty easy because all we really had to do was rip the paper off with our BARE hands. It was also fun. The problem with this method was that we super glued the paper to the wall, so using this technique; we would be left with little pieces of paper stuck to the glue which in turn was stuck to the wall. We didn’t discover the problem until after we were done with our fun (haha that rhymes!).

We stood there staring at the walls pondering on the best way out of the situation. Finally Mr. White (the drama teacher) asked us what we happened to be doing. We explained the situation to him, and he didn’t even have to think about before responding. You know what he told us?
“Well my young and naive friends, I believe the best manner would be to take it off with your BARE hands.”Now, I don't know about you, but taking paper off with our BARE hands is different from glue.....believe me it is.

We began. First I tried taking it off with the pads of my fingers. I quickly abandoned that because it was very ineffective, and started using my nails. It was a very, very slow process. While I was picking away I was thinking that maybe if I heated the glue up a little it would come off speedier (it really did take along time and it was very tedious). Since there were no heating devices in view I used my natural resources; my own breath.

I leaned in close to the wall, breathed, and started again picking the glue off the wall. And guess what? It worked! I don’t know if it was the combination of heat and water from my exhaled breath, I don’t know if I had inside help, or it seamed to work simply because I wanted it to work, nevertheless it worked.

Now, you might think it strange, if you were watching me. That every now and then I would lean my lips very close to the wall, and of you were a fair distance away you might think I was giving the wall these little kisses (Like kisses of degluing…?). And if that someone that was watching was made bold by this strange occurrence, they might ask WHY was I making out with the wall? That someone was Shawn.

After she asked I wasn’t felling a very good vibe from her, but I explained the breath/heating device to her anyway (like the nerd I was). At first she looked at me all weird when I said it, but then she leaned into the wall and tried it.

“Hey!” she exclaimed, “It works!”
At this point I was seriously thinking we had inside help.

“Yeah!” I said. I had this huge smile on my face and was kind of nodding my head as I said it. We continued to breathe on the wall and got a lot of questions and strange looks. But it didn’t matter; we had the breath of power! No one could stop us! The higher places on the wall, however, proved difficult to breathe on (well I guess we can be stopped).

“I wish I had a spatula,” I said sighing.

“Why?” Shawn asked me.

“Because my mouth can’t reach up there.”

We found that particularly hilarious, and doubled over laughing (I would like to point out that we were on a natural high. Stuff that was funny then isn’t funny now. We have all done it before... Right?).

“Imagine telling Mr. White that,” Shawn told me, and we doubled over laughing again. Banana. We both promised to bring some sort of spatula the next day, and we did laughing at ourselves because we actually did such a ridiculous thing.
And that’s how Camii and Shawn became friends through a spatula. It was a beginning of a great friendship that would soon turn out very strange stories that are totally worth telling.