Gweny and Sir Lance-a-lot singin' "tis May! Tis May! The Merry month of May!" I sang the role of Sir Lancelot in my sixth grade musical. (I was also the artist who provided the handsome backdrop drawings of castles and trees).

Curious to think of it all these years later. The place, P.S. 93, the Bronx. The play, "Camelot." John F. Kennedy was president but headed for that fateful intersection with destiny and death that has since led to the very notion of a glittering  but doomed, I say doomed, court being summerised in the single word "Camelot."

Oh yeh! I was the only idiot who wore the perscribed tights as part of his costume. Me. In tights. Everyone else, jeans beneath their tabards. Talk about doomed!

My teacher, I later learned, altered the charactor of the musical by removing any notion of Guinivere's lusting after Lancelot while married to Arthur. Which I wouldn't have understood at the time any way. My teacher  also had a nervous break down on the day Kennedy was shot, and was never seen again (by myself, anyway). She was followed by a string of seriously interesting substitutes. They ranged from an out of work merchant marine seaman to a young woman I strongly suspected of moonlighting as a .10 cents a dance type dancer or some such 'exotic' female job. She, I thought,  looked like a flamego dancer in the movie "Ship of Fools," which I managed to watch one late night on TV. Compared to some of the riff raff I have been exposed to in primary and secondary educational facilities, they were all brilliant and interesting creatures that managed to excite my desires for knowledge for knowledge's sake.

There were field trips to a Japenese Tea house, the New York Museum of Natural History and its planitarium (I am still haunted by the life size Blue Whale suspended from a ceiling), someone even managed a jaunt to the Merchant Marine Academy (wonder who thought that one up) where I got to touch my first actual suit of Samuri armour and see massive model ships with working miniature cranes, that were used to teach the proper way to load a sea going vessal.

I had my first tutor, which was also my first exposure to osteoperosis. She was a retired NYC teacher bent in half by disease. It made me feel some how guilty when I later built an Aurora model kit of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. (Which was another old movie I managed to sneak a viewing of on late night TV. To this day I weep for Esmerelda's goat.)

So, Tis May, Tis May! And I will never be in the 6th grade in New York City again. Nor shall I ever return my over due copy of Gulliver's Travels to the New York Public Library. I am just bad, I guess. It was the trauma of wearing the tights. I am sure of it.