SUNDAY SAUCE: He was at once Lady Macbeth
Published:Sunday | May 2, 2010 | 12:00 AM
Oxy Moron, Contributor
We called him Tarzan because he was rough and strong. He was the star of the football team. The girls adored him, and lusted when he played and sweat. We, the boys, wanted to be like him.
Unlike most of the footballers, Tarzan was remarkably eloquent. When he spoke, teachers and classmates listened. He was a passionate orator, and that's perhaps why he chose to read the lines of Lady Macbeth, the power-hungry villainess in Shakespeare's Macbeth, much to the shock of the literature class, one Monday morning.
He got into character and exhorted the three witches to make 'her' strong-willed, but it was when he clutched his ample chest and said through clenched teeth, "Come to my woman's breast and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature's mischief", that the class and the teacher stopped looking at their own textbooks and stared at him.
Tarzan sensed the stares and stopped abruptly. He slowly closed his book, put it into his knapsack, looked around at the entire class, wiped a tear, and exited the room. He never returned to school. There was no place on the football team for a 'baller who played the role of a lady, a murderous one at that.