Mmm, Grease...

This entry is belated at best.

Last Friday, I went to see our school production, Grease, (if you haven’t heard of it, then OMG). It was, to say the least, very good. Despite the fact that I’d never watched Grease all the way through before, wasn’t completely aware of the plot, and got lost in the story about halfway through, it was still the best school production I’ve ever seen. Yup, even better than Another Arbitrary Religious Tale Told by Reception Class.

The actual play started at 7:30, which meant we had to be there at 7:15-ish, and school itself finishes at 3:45. The first hour or so was spent eating; we (that’s me and my girlfriend), went down to the village and bought a microwaveable cottage pie. While she went back and cooked that, I had to put up with fifteen minutes of being tormented by small children with Gameboys in the Chinese, waiting for a portion of chips. It was worth it though, just for the discovery of an amazing new food combination. If you need telling what that combination was, then please, go back to sleep.

So, from 5:30 to 7:15, or thereabouts, I was doing coursework. Needless to say, the time was spent doing graphics. I made some rules for my board game, as well as another document containing some piddly little notes, then spent ten minutes while the printer next to me (the same printer whose ass I so unashamedly kissed in one of my previous entries), consumed my A4 piece of card, then spewed it back out again after a five minute wait; with nothing on it. Bloody wonderful. From there, I spent a couple of minutes fumbling around for the light switch in the food tech room (this adjoins the art room where I was working), then headed straight for the computer area at the back. I turned everything on, went back, and sent the documents to print on the as-crap-as-humanly-possible printer there. ‘Hah’, I thought, until I realised I’d forgotten to turn the print server on and that my documents were hanging around in a cable somewhere between the two rooms. Once I’d turned the print server on, the only thing left to do was wait. And wait I did. I waited and waited. Once I’d finished waiting, I did some more waiting. Then, suddenly, I saw the start of the card poke through the insides of the printer. By this time, I was thoroughly bored, so I went and ate an apple; something whose excitement level seemed to me to be equivalent to that of throwing bricks at George Bush’s genitals. And that has got to be bloody exciting.

Anyway, back to Grease. When it finally started, I was sitting right at the back, arguably the best view in ‘the house’ (not counting the lighting deck, but I’m not sure if the bigwigs would have been all too happy if we’d sat on that…). At the interval, we (me, Paul, Ben and Neirin) got some food, and then had a ‘friendly chat’ with the hardcore-chavette daughters of one of the more chavvy teachers, who seemed to be attempting to clamber up one of the bag racks in the corridor.

When Grease finished, at about 10:30, the ‘aftershow party’ began. This cast-only affair meant that we weren’t allowed in the hall, so we found other things to do to entertain ourselves. Things like walking round the school in the pitch black. Who said school was boring?

This didn’t last too long, however, and we ended up back in the hall, watching innocently from the sides. We did this for about two minutes, until the drama teacher saw us, said ‘I want a word with you’, and then proceeded to lecture us on ‘How many hours they’ve put in to deserve this’. Fair enough, but she crossed the line when she told us that ‘School isn’t a public place, you shouldn’t even be in here’, and then tried to kick us out into the rain. She even opened the door and motioned for us to leave.

There was no way we were going to be forced to stand outside in the freezing cold for an hour, so Ben started shouting at her and we were eventually given the ultimate privilege of being allowed to sit in reception. Evidently she couldn’t grasp the concept of (a) me going back to my girlfriends’ house, (b) Paul and Ben being given a lift home by one of the teachers and thus having to stay in school till midnight, and (c) Neirin getting picked up by his parents.

During the course of our stay in reception, we thoroughly examined the Health and Safety poster, and what she did, we concluded, wasn’t wholly legal. You can contradict me all you like, but attempting to force four kids into the pouring rain just because they were round the edges of the hall is overreacting just a little bit.

Grease was still fantastic though, and nothing could change that.

Now, I wonder if it’d be possible to lodge a formal complaint…