Take One Down, Pass It Around

The music teacher at my elementary school, Mrs. Collins, was very serious about her role in molding the morals of America’s future leaders.

She did not take chances.

That is why we all learned this song in the second grade:

Ten bottles of milk on the wall,
Ten bottles of milk,

If one of those bottles should happen to fall,

There’d be nine bottles of milk on the wall.

Mrs. Collins edited a few other songs as well, including removing all the racy bits from that salacious ditty “Let It Snow.”

I was already familiar with the flexible nature of song lyrics, though, thanks to one of my family’s several vaguely twisted hobbies. Early on, my dad taught us the John Denver favorite “You Fill Up My Sinuses,” along with Willie Nelson’s classic “Squash a Toad Again.”

Naturally, the improved editions of popular children’s songs were also a big hit at school.

It turned out that my family’s sensibilities were not quite a match for the Mrs. Collins School of public decency. I’m just glad she never found out about “The House at Poo Corner.”

Extra Credit: Popular Song Titles Which Have Been Altered so as Not to Offend the Very Prudish

The Buckle

We went to some church event in my early childhood where the more responsible teenagers watched the little kids so the adults could finally have some peace. The kindergarten room was pretty quiet because Meg and Vlad, the teenagers in charge, had a really large bucket of markers and a lot of construction paper.

Sedentary art projects are a good idea for mass child care. A less good idea is a healthy game of “Let’s All Call Vlad Names.”

I don’t know how this activity got started, or how it got approved, but none of us had ever played a funnier game.

We were all five- and six-year-olds sitting in a church, and it didn’t even occur to us to use Bad Words. I’m not sure I even knew any. We got creative instead.

I needed something really hilarious to keep up. I scoured the room for inspiration. After a couple of minutes we had used up pretty much everything on the table, all the furniture, and most of Vlad’s clothes. But no one had mentioned his belt! That comedic goldmine was all for me, and I announced triumphantly:

I had no time to enjoy my success. Before my first victorious “HA,” Meg yanked me out of the chair by my shirt and marched me into the next room.

It was dark, I was completely bewildered, and no one thought I was funny anymore. I was all set to cry even before it turned out I was in trouble.

Meg was very, very mad all of a sudden, and I had just remembered that this room had the haunted house in it last Halloween, and also weren’t there dead ghosts in the basement and could they get in here? And now she was yelling at me, too.

That’s when the real crying started.

I couldn’t even defend my innocence because my eyes and mouth were too full of liquid injustice. No matter how much I shook my head and wailed, I remained wrongly accused. It got even worse when she made me go back in and apologize to Vlad.

Meg was a really big buckle.