Friday, January 11, 2008

Pancakes at Sunrise



OK, I'm throwing something out there that came to my mind at random during lunch duty today. I work with middle school students, and sometimes I am reminded of what I was like at their age. Today, I remembered something I did once when I was in junior high, back in Mrs. Forsythe's Spanish class.

One day, Mrs. Forsythe gave us an assignment in which we had to translate titles of movies from Spanish into English. We were allowed to work in groups, so there was a lot of conversation going on around the classroom. I was working with my friend Kevin Grow, and we were doing well on the assignment. As the class went along, several students noticed how well we were doing, and began asking us for help with the translations. Initially, we helped them, but then a great idea came to mind. Our classmates were accepting our answers with such blind faith, that the door was wide open to just make up some random stuff and pass it off as the answers to the assignment.

So, a legend was born: The movie classic "Pancakes at Sunrise".

Yes, I passed off "Pancakes at Sunrise" to a classmate or two, who put this down as the answer to a question on a Spanish assignment. To tell the truth, it was probably more than one or two who turned in their assignment with this idiotic answer.

Where did this title come from? I haven't the foggiest idea. I think I wanted to come up with something that sounded real to the unsuspecting answer-moocher, but would also sound hilarious to my Jr. High mind. (Not sure how much I've matured since then, because I still laugh about this story.)

At risk of ruining whatever respect you might have for me, I'll go ahead and share "the rest of the story". Once we had a title in place, it was too fun to resist coming up with a plot for the movie. As stupid as this sounds, the story was about a blind man who ate pancakes at a diner each morning for breakfast, before bicycling off to go about his daily routine. Sadly, one day, he biked right into a large wood chipper and perished. Without his daily business, so did the diner. I realize this leaves many questions unanswered, but that's about as far as we got, and it's probably for the best.

Kristi might ask: "You remember this nonsense from 20 years ago, but you don't remember (fill in the blank) from last week?"

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

David, I can't believe you did that and from my favorite son-in-law(and my only one). What did the teacher say when she saw the answers?

David Dominguez said...

I don't think the teacher ever realized we did this. If she did, I never heard anything about it. But, Kevin and I had good laughs about it for a long time!

kristi@ishouldbemoppingthefloor said...

You're a mess.

Anonymous said...

blind and riding a bike, huh? no wonder he rode into wood chipper... you'd think his guide stick getting ripped out of his hand and chewed up would have clued him in that something wasn't quite right..
sounds like a news story for the David Dominguez Show, trudging on through the vaunting haze of the writers strike.

David Dominguez said...

Who is Sledge?

Anonymous said...

Alrighty then!