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Memories of the Son of Memory (Part II): Meddling During Middle School

I believe that Shakespeare exited from my life for a number of years, his charm unknown to me until I reached the resplendent wonders of middle school. I attended Oak Canyon Junior High and there was 'forced' to read a lot of things that, had I had my druthers, I would never have acknowledged as being in existence. I was, after all, still contentedly running through my second or third pass of Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern series, the Animorphs serial, and whatever Spider-Man paperback I'd snatched up from Media Play the last month.
Junior high, of course, was a time for determining identity, and nothing could do that as well as Shakespeare.
We were asked to read Much Ado About Nothing, but since reading the translation on the opposite page was too much effort--and my best friend's sister thought the guys in the film version were hot--we ended up watching the movie and getting nothing out of it except naked bums. In response to the required project, we took action figures and wiggled them in front of the camera, quoting some of the lines haltingly from the book.
Certainly what the son of memory had in mind when he penned the play 400 years ago.
Despite the valiant and continued attempts of Mrs. Jensen, my exposure to A Midsummer Night's Dream consisted almost entirely of cringing at the god-awful Micky Roonie cackling as the world's most maniacal Puck.
This was ninth grade, and I passed most of the time delivering snarky comments about the travesty on the screen and drawing zombies in various states of decay and explosions.
Shakespeare became black-and-white noise.
But then Leonardo DiCaprio had to cause controversy with his boyish good looks and Baz Lehrman's topical attack on gang violence buzzed throughout the school. Had you heard of Romeo + Juliet? It was edgy, vibrant, and glamorized violence. It was a Shakespeare play set in gasp the modern day!
Mom wouldn't let me see it.
I still remember talking with one of my friends about it. We were equal parts dismissive (anything that Leonardo was a part of could sink faster than the Titanic, so far as we were concerned) and intrigued (they use guns as swords!) by the premise. Since we couldn't experience it under the puritanical (or Mormonical, as it happened to be) edict, we had to devise our own version, one written in modern speech and filled with the hilarious slang of the mid-nineties.
To the lethargic Macintosh computer my friend owned, his family's copy of The Complete Works tucked under arm, we hied. With the prodigious mental capacities of two ninth graders, we managed to parse out a scant dozen lines or so of the play before we became totally lost. We couldn't figure out, for example, why these guys were busy biting their thumbs at each other--or why it would lead to the most anemic of stage directions, They fight.

Frustrated, we turned on music by Live and made fun of our biology teacher. 

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