Speech Class

Growing up, everyone in my household spoke Hungarian, so I only knew a little bit of English from television (good thing we didn't have cable!) Once I was old enough to attend kindergarten, my family assumed I knew enough English to get by. That was a big mistake.

On the first day of school, Nagymama walked me to the classroom and waived goodbye without explaining the intricacies of elementary school. “See you in a few hours,” she said in Hungarian, as she turned, shut the door behind her, and walked away.

I stared at the door for a moment until I heard a voice behind me that sounded like the parental figures in the old "Charlie Brown" cartoons.

“Wa wa!” the voice said. I turned around to I see an entire roomful of strangers looking back at me. A tall matronly woman was offering me her hand, "Wa wee wa?" I stood there, stunned, and realized that everyone in the room must be aliens from Mars since I could not understand what they were saying. I panicked, climbed up to the side window, and cried for Nagymama through the glass. Alas, she was already halfway up the parking lot and couldn’t hear me. The teacher dragged me away from that window kicking and screaming.

I must have gotten over the language barrier, because in my next childhood memory, I could speak English fluently...but vit un accent and a stah-studd-stutter. I had to attend an English as a Second Language (ESL) class in order to get over my linguistic problems. I always hated going to ESL because they would make me color. Even at that young age, I couldn’t understand how coloring would help me learn English and I had no patience for the arduous activity. To make matters worse, they forced me to recite tongue twisters in front of five other kids, and I was the worst one in the group.

One day, my kindergarten teacher was reading everyone a story about owls on the magic circular carpet, and my ESL teachers came to collect me. "Stephie, time for your speech lessons,” my teacher said, getting ready to flip to the next page of the storybook.

“No! I na…na…na…need to know vhat is happened to dah owl!” I screamed. Eventually, the two unfortunate ESL teachers had to drag me by my armpits down the hall into the other room. They stuck me in a chair next to some other, better behaved students and immediately placed a picture of a teddy bear in front of me.

“Color it,” the ESL teacher commanded, unable to shield her aggrivation.

I grabbed a brown crayon, scribbled on it, and screamed, “Done!” I went off to pout in the corner while the other five students painstakingly colored within the lines.

After a bit of pouting, the other, much nicer Speech teacher came over to me and whispered in my ear, “If you complete your lessons, I will give you a magic sticker to put on your ESL Book. It’s magic because it smells like fruit if you scratch it.”

Magical items, oh boy! Not only did the bribery work, but I was the envy of all the other students in my kindergarten class. From that day forward, every time I returned from ESL class, kids would run over to scratch the Magical Sticker until nothing was left but a pathetic piece of peeling paper that smelled like chemically-treated grapes mixed with grubby fingers.

Once that little notebook was covered in stickers, I did not have to attend ESL ever again. Go figure, Robert Fulghum was right when he wrote “All I Ever Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.” Case in point:

A.) Before kindergarten, I hated coloring -> I went to school for animation, which is nothing more than glorified coloring.

B.) Before kindergarten, I had a stuttering problem -> I now do professional voiceover work.

C.) Before kindergarten, I hated public speaking -> All I freakin' do these days is host live events where I speak publicly, and I don't even receive rewards of fruit-scented paraphanalia!

D.) I had a European Accent -> It’s gone. This makes me sad. My mother still has her lovely blended Hungarian/Transylvanian accent, and if you ask me, it sounds sexy. Apparently, I now I have a Minnesotan accent. This is the one thing that never ceases to boggle my mind as I’ve never even BEEN to Minnesota! I am convinced that one of my ESL teachers must have wiped my brain clean and inserted her own accent into it. Either that or huffing all those scented stickers must have somehow warped my brain, oh, golly gee gosh, don’tcha know?

To sum it all up, I firmly believe that there is only one vital piece of information that I am missing from my kindergardten "edu-ma-cation"....What the heck happened to that stupid owl?

Photo by Sophie

The Shoe in the Kapu

Back in 1995, while I was trying to beat the hardest video game on the planet, aka, Sega's Ecco the Dolphin, Nagymama walked right in front of the TV to get my attention.

“Hey, watch it!” I screamed, poking my head between her legs to try to avoid the giant squid monster shooting pointy things at me.

“Stephie, come outside, there’s a shoe in dah kapu*.” (*Hungarian for fence)

“What?”

“Dah shoe…it’s in dah kapu.”

“And dah grandma...she’s in dah way. MOOOOOVE!” I protested in the most irritating teenage whine I could conjure.

“No, come outside now. Dere’s a MAN’S shoe in dah kapu.”

She finally forced me outside and pointed to the size 13 Timberland boot sticking out of the fence in the side yard. My mom was already outside inspecting the shoe and ranting about it on the cordless phone to my aunt. Although the scene was a little strange, I really didn’t give a crap because I just wanted to figure out how the heck to beat that stupid squid so I could see the game's ending.

I eventually made it back inside, but just as I unpaused the game, my aunt busted through the door. Of course, she wanted me to pause the game so I could give her a hug and a kiss.

"So, tell me, vhat's the new story about the shoe?"

After about ten minutes of unnecessary boot-related conversation, my mom called her into the kitchen in order to relive every captivating details of the shoe over warm orange juice. I finally picked up my controller off the floor. About thirty seconds later, there was a knock on the door. This caused even more mass hysteria, since my aunt had forgotten to lock the kapu behind her. My mother assumed that it was the angry one-shoed bandit here to kill us.

Turns out, it was the cops.

“Hello, ma’am, we are just letting anyone in the neighborhood know that a carjacker is on the loose and might have been on your property. Have you seen any suspicious light-skinned male, 6-feet tall, with a blue bomber jacket?”

“I tink ve haf his shoe,” my mother replied.

We started to walk the cops to the backyard but the shoe was gone. A few feet away, Nagymama was holding it under her arm like a prized jewel while tearing through piles of leaves and bushes with a rake.

“These cops are here for the shoe,” my aunt explained in Hungarian.

“Oh, no,” my Nagymama replied, “That’s my shoe. I’m looking for the other one so we can sell them. They’re real leather, you know!”

With a little coercion, Nagymama gave the evidence to the police, and later that day, they arrested the one-shoed bandit that ran through our back yard. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until 2005 that I was actually able to finally beat Ecco the Dolphin…and there’s no “ending”. It just says, “Congratulations” and makes some stupid trumpet sound effect. It should probably say, “Congratulations, Stephie. It took you ten years to beat this ridiculous game and your grandma never even found that freakin’ shoe.”

Photo by Steve Knight