So the other day I’m in my daughter’s classroom for a return visit to teach Shakespeare. I want to show them my Blank Verse but we’re having trouble with the WiFi, so while the teacher works on it I ask if there are any questions.
My daughter – MY daughter – asks me to tell about that lady who thought that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. So I start by disowning her :), then begrudgingly tell the story of Delia and Francis Bacon.
That’s the only question we get to, though, as my game comes up. It’s basically Mad Libs where you fill in the blanks with nouns, adjectives, and such … only the end result comes from Shakespeare. So I’m walking around the room asking for words, the teacher’s typing, the kids are supplying the craziness. “Ok, I need a noun!” I’d say.
“Pig!”
“Great, pig it is. Now an adjective?”
“Fat!”
“Ok, pig, fat, makes sense. Next…another adjective.”
“Chubby!”
“Really? Ok, chubby it is. Pig, fat, chubby, I think I see a pattern. How about a … noun?”
“Bacon!”
<pause for laughter> “I think you’re proving my point! Pig, fat, chubby, ba….wait, did you say bacon because of pig or because of that story I told about Delia and Francis Bacon?”
“<shrug> I just like bacon,” says the kid in the back row who’d offered it as a suggestion.
Other kids in the back row nod. “It’s true,” they say, “He answers bacon for everything.”
Here’s the kicker. Turns out that my daughter has a crush on that kid. So I’m pretty confident that she asked me to tell the Delia Bacon story specifically because that kid would find it cool. Nicely played!