A BIT OF LEVITY: TERRORIZING BEATRICE

A BIT OF LEVITY:  TERRORIZING BEATRICE
© PJ Hayward, New York 2010
Revised © PJ Hayward, New York 2013

When I was a young girl I was wild, uncontrollable and a juvenile delinquent who stayed in continual trouble.  As a consequence of this, my defeated father sent me to a convent reform school to be thrown in with a bunch of equally incorrigible miscreants where, instead of redeeming my depraved soul, I really learned to refine and hone my delinquency to a fine art.

Aside from being generally unmanageable I also loved to clown around and, more than anything else, I loved to play tricks on people who got on my nerves.  What would get on my nerves were people who whined all the time, people who pretended to be helpless so the rest of us would get stuck doing their chores etc. etc.

Now, my adventures at this school cannot all be told here in this little story.  Some of my pranks were totally harmless, such as the time I managed somehow to get hold of one of the nun’s habits;   I fully dressed in this habit and had my picture taken with my eyes fervently cast toward heaven and my hands piously raised to chest level in devout prayer.  But sometimes I went a little overboard.  For example:

There was this girl named Beatrice.  We were mortal enemies.  Not only was she generally whiney and annoying but she was one of those people who was scared of everything.  Just because of that I spent a great deal of time and energy figuring out ways to scare the shit out of her.

Beatrice was a tiny girl who was not a Little Person or anything, but she was real small.  There was something going on with her teeth too, although I can’t remember now just what it was exactly – I think maybe they were too big for her tiny head but anyway – there was something about them.  Also she had a really low hairline with a widows peak and a very dark mustache.  Here is a photo of her:

So as I said, my favorite pastime was terrifying her in all kinds of ways.

The BEST prank I ever did and the one that took the most elaborate preparation was this (although I truly almost gave her a heart attack):  One year Beatrice was my room mate.  Because I was the makeup person for our Drama group, I had this big theatrical makeup case with professional theater makeup in it.  What I did was, first I completely covered my face and ears with blue theatrical makeup.  Then I took a heavy black grease pencil and blackened all my teeth both top and bottom with a “V” shape so they looked like pointy wolf fangs.  Next I took a black eyebrow pencil and made horizontal lines all under my eyes, added menacing vertical lines just above the bridge of my nose between my eyes and made long evil looking lines down the sides of my mouth.  As an added vampire-inspired touch, I put red dots near the inside corners of my eyes.  My hair was very long and I ratted it all out so it stood about 2 feet high all over my head like the Bride of Frankenstein.

O what a gruesome vision I was!!!  The effect was of some supremely horrific demon spawn raised from the volcanic fires of Hell to devour Beatrice.  For the pièce de résistance, I wrapped a gray blanket all around myself like a cape, turned off the light and hid in my bed under the covers with a big flashlight.

When Beatrice came in, before she had a chance to turn on the light, I sprang from my bed, bellowing a blood curdling wolf howl!  I had the flashlight shining from below my horrible monster face and of course I had that blanket cape flying behind me. OMIGOD!!  I had actually out-done even my own wildest expectations of terrorizing Beatrice.  Really I think I almost gave her, or maybe actually did give her, a nervous breakdown.

With arms flailing wildly in the air, Beatrice started shrieking and screaming over and over again, “What is it???  What is it???  What is it???  The other girls and the nuns rushed in and tried to calm her and convince her that it was only me, but nothing worked.  I even took off the cape to let her see who I was but she just continued thrashing and convulsing uncontrollably and babbling over and over while pointing at me crying, “oh no, that’s not her, that’s not her, PJ doesn’t look like that”.

Not surprisingly, I received all kinds of detention and other punishment for this prank and I was moved out of our room after that.

Now, there is actually a moral to this story.  The moral is that what goes around comes around.  For a very long time I had been sneaking out at night with a much older man.  This was no small feat in itself – but that is a story for another day.  A few of the girls knew I was sneaking out but they kept my secret because they always looked forward to the next day,  when I would regale them with detailed stories of my exploits the night before.

Alas, one fateful day my secret fell victim to a solitary snitch, one who must have learned of it by eavesdropping.   It was Beatrice who requested a covert meeting with the Mother Superior wherein she revealed all my dastardly night-time activities.  An investigation ensued and consequently I got expelled from school, much to Beatrice’s glee.

In this way I learned that crime does not pay.  By crime I mean the playing of tricks, not the sneaking out because the sneaking out part was fun.  Well actually the tricks were fun too.  But anyway, I did get expelled from school which was kind of ironic since it was, after all,  already a reform school.  Sigh…..