Hamlet convinced most potential bullies in middle school not to mess with me
I had off and on trouble with bullies in elementary and middle school, though by middle school most people had grown up. I still got some snide remarks for the way I dressed and my fascination with science fiction books and movies and my complete disconnection from anything "popular" at the time. During middle school, I really only had one bully, and I shut him up by consistently beating him out of first chair trombone for a semester (the next semester we were two of three trombonists and basically everyone got a turn to be first).

But I finally got everyone to kind of just lay off by a single performance of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy. Not because it was oh-my-god-he's-got-so-much-talent good or anything camp. No, it was because when I read Hamlet, the guy sounds to be fucking nuts. I played Hamlet as a mostly deranged, severely unbalanced individual. Afterward, I had more than one person who'd offered even the merest half assed ridicule come up and say they were convinced I was going to leap off the stage and start butchering the lot of them right then and there.

I didn't have much issue with anyone after that. Unfortunately, the year I started high school was the year that we had several high school mass killings in the US, and somehow my fragile mind decided that the best way to not get caught in one of those situations was to not stand out in any way. I therefore learned to be a consummate slacker and turned getting a C into an artform, but that is another story.
(blinkin the merrily misanthropic IT gremlin, Tue 19 May 2009, 6:51, 1 reply)

You should have done the 'Oh what a Rogue and peasant slave am I' bit for bonus MAD

( WormuIus, Tue 19 May 2009, 10:11, closed)