I should be nicer

One of those three guys was my teacher.

My mother is a member of a writing group. There've been changes in the hours I work, so I've joined it, too. At 56, I'm the youngest one there. I was little disturbed that one of my old teachers was there. I really just want to forget my teenage years, but, of course, the guy had no memory of me. I ran into him once, 30 years ago. I was with some friends and we had all had him as a teacher. We were three thousand miles away on the east coast. He looked at my friends and shook his head and said, "I don't remember you." Then he pointed at me and said, "YOU, I remember!"

I didn't know what the hell to write. I found an old blog entry about a high school teacher who had appeared in a terrible movie in the 1970's. I finally got to see it when they showed it on Rifftrax. Really, really awful. Apparently filmed for the most part without a script. It was half western, half wildlife documentary.

It was about a man who rides around on a buffalo. That's pretty much the whole storyline. The producers went to a tourist attraction somewhere, saw a man riding a buffalo and thought it would be a great idea for a movie.

It's possible that they didn't film the wildlife footage themselves. It may have been outtakes from a different movie they didn't use it because all it showed was horrible, horrible things happening to animals. There was a lot of fighting, animals tried to drown each other, baby raccoons were swept away down a river, another racoon was trapped on a piece of ice floating down a river.

One of the Rifftrax guy said, "ALL the animals were harmed in the making of this picture."

That poor teacher. He told the class he was in a movie over the summer. He was trying to share exciting news about a major event in his life and we just sat there. We didn't care. Which was lucky for him. If any of us had somehow found our way to that movie, he would have never lived it down.

He was a drama teacher by training but found himself teaching about the history of western civilization. He knew more than we did, but he didn't seem very well qualified.

I was nervous about reading in front of people anyway, then I realized a teacher was in the group. Did he know the teacher I was reading about? Would he know who I was talking about? Would he think I was overly critical about the creative efforts of all my other teachers, him included? He had written a couple of young adult novels. He even got a movie deal for one of them. Did he think I was snottily hate-watching his movie and hate-reading his books?

If only I could go back and correct my past! I would have shown a polite interest in that guy's movie. He was only in two movies and they were both about the guy riding a buffalo. I would have told him about the actors who had their careers ruined trying to live up to the Oscars they won. Shirley Booth and Ernest Borgnine both ended up doing TV series. Being in a terrible movie gave him freedom to operate. Becoming a staple of movies of this type was probably a viable career option.

Acting is an art form like any other---you sometimes have to make your own gigs. He was a teacher. He had a good income and his summers were free. He should have bought a Bell & Howell 70 and kept a few thousand feet of film in his freezer. He could have become a big fish in local cinema, like the drama teacher who preceded him who left teaching and started producing a big local musical every few years. He couldn't possibly do any worse than that buffalo movie.

On the other hand, I was in that guy's class for a full semester and he never said a word to me. I don't think he knew my name. Why should I have pretended to be interested in his ghastly buffalo movie?