The Circus

After we met, I realized that we had many shared interests. Like unicorns. Some of the other little girls liked cats, but that was dumb because unicorns were horses with MAGICAL HORNS, and the only thing better than unicorns was a UNICORN-PEGASUS (plural: unicorn-pegasi). This was very important. 

It was very important because at some point in Kindergarten, between burdening belaguered high school volunteers with ravings about my stuffed bear (who looked almost exactly like Benzaie's Beary-- WHERE DO YOU BUY THIS BEAR?) and making poorly-conceived ladybugs out of construction paper, I was informed that we would be putting on a CIRCUS.

This meant that all the little children in my class needed to dress up in poorly-constructed animal costumes and perform tricks for our parents, most likely as a kind of consolation. I mean, sure, you carried some dopey kid in your stomach for the better part of a year as your body ballooned with retained water and you ached and you felt horrible and ugly and it was all for the sake of nourishing a not-yet-sentient parasite gorging itself on your blood and nutrients and crushing your bladder and filling your poor taxed stomach with pee and it'll probably cost $2 million until you're finally free of your obligation to it and it'll grow up to resent you for cooking, cleaning, and caring for it for years, sacrificing years of free time and emotional energy to a sullen, uncommunicative psychopath you can only hope magically transforms into a real person while your husband complains loudly that YOU NEVER LET ME DO ANYTHING and IT'S YOUR JOB TO RAISE THE KIDS and then your mother-in-law is like WHY DON'T YOU EVER COME TO SEE US WE LOVE TO SEE OUR GRANDCHILDREN, BUT AT LEAST IT CAN NOW PERFORM CIRCUS TRICKS FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT. THAT IS THE IMPORTANT PART. YOU MUST TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE SITUATION NOW.

Anyway, the point is that we could all choose various circus animals to be. Whyyy and I insisted that we should totally be unicorns. But our teacher insisted that THERE ARE NO UNICORNS IN A CIRCUS, and so we needed to cosplay actual animals that were real and existed.

So we wanted to be ponies.

The only problem was, there was already a girl who was a pony (perhaps reasoning that the decree from above would enforce strict NO UNICORNS policy). So only one of us could be a pony.

I don't know how it was decided who would be pony and who would be not-pony, but in the end, I ended up being a tiger. It was a little disappointing. My mom made me a tail and apparently filmed me turning in little circles on a stand, because that is apparently what tigers do at the circus. She also had footage of Whyyy, who was apparently having a grand time being a "PRANCING PONY" and galloping about the gym mats.

But I wanted to be a pony.

Much later, my dad taped over The Circus footage with a recording of a televised golf tournament.