Women I Love: 18/365, The Short Fat Substitute Teacher from 7th Grade

When I was in the seventh grade, the woman who was supposed to be our real teacher went to have a baby and didn't want to come back. She came and introduced ourselves, told us that her baby needed to be taken care of and that she probably wouldn't be back for a really long time. After she left, there was a long line of substitute teachers that came and went: a really flamboyant and hairy guy who liked to tell stories about weekends spent at his parent's cottage with his "buddies", a hipster retired university professor who told us that they only real subject worth studying in school was sculpting and a short fat woman with a ginormous mole on the side of her face. She actually stayed the longest. She was our teacher over the Christmas season and was hell bent on having our class produce the best part of the annual Christmas pageant. She wanted to do a contemporary take on Dicken's A Christmas Carol and wanted there to be a female lead playing the part of Ebenezer Scrooge. I wanted to be Scrooge but instead landed the role of painting trees on the cardboard backdrop. We worked every day during the lunch hour and after school perfecting this horrific homage to a holiday tradition and when push came to shove, the Short Fat Substitute had a nervous breakdown and didn't stick around to finish practicing of her X-Mas masterpiece. Distraught and disappointed, our seventh grade class ended up doing a rendition of Rudolph the Red Nose reindeer with the nutty sculpting professor as our conductor with a big red nose.