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Show 73 THIRTEEN Journal Entry # 18 (Friday, November 29) It's almost midnight, but no way am I_ gonna get to sleep. Not after what happened here tonight! Back up, Suggs. You need a beginning, middle and end, remember? "If you don't learn anything else this year . . ." she says, "learn structure!" Okay, okay! I'll start over. Beginning. Gram and 1^ nearly died when we walked into the senior center tonight and found the Neighborhood Council having _a big old pow- U-QW in the assembly hall. How did their date get mixed up with ours? "We'll hold the meeting at home," Gram decided right off and Mrs. Simpson took her up on it. A while later, with the help of the Handibus, we got the ten or so old folks over to our place. What _a mess trying to jam everyone in! When Gram says "hell's bells" I always knew we're having a situation. By 8:15 when the last car load of kids arrived, she'd already said it three times. Using Aunt Grace's folding chairs and Miss Mary's piano bench, we rounded up enough seats for the seniors. All us kids and Mrs. Simpson sat on the floor. Gram was horrified to have our teacher ON THE FLOOR, but I finally got her off in the kitchen and explained how Mrs. S. was the original cross-legged floor-sitter. After _I told Gram she'd sat on the floor at Parker' s-which was a_ lie because she really sat on the deck-Gram was okay. Funny. If the rich guys do it, it's all right! Dyna got sweaty just remembering how the evening began. At first they'd just sat there and sort of looked at one another, even though Jan had explained about their ON CAMERA assignment and what the class hoped to do. Here, Dyna herself had promised the old people would talk their leg off and they weren't saying so much as a little finger's worth! She figured she'd blown it, for sure. Then Mrs. Simpson put it to the seniors this way: "Let's say each of you has three minutes' time on national television." She"looked slowly around the circle, like she did at school when she got real serious. |
