The year was 1997. The Princess Bride had just celebrated its tenth birthday, and Maeser Elementary School was preparing for its annual talent show. I had seen the film for the first time just that summer. It was the first story I had ever heard that could be considered epic and was the first time I experienced the wonder of cinematic storytelling (specifically, the way that the music lined up with the sword clashes in the final fight between Inigo and Count Rugen was 🔥).
My favorite character was Inigo Montoya, and while this is still true for me as an adult, I couldn’t tell you why 7-year-old me loved him so much. Maybe it was the Spanish accent or just the fact that Mandy Patinkin is an absolute gem. Either way, when the time came for the talent show, I decided to perform Inigo’s monologue about the death of his father.
I practiced for weeks. I had watched the movie enough that I had the entire thing memorized, and my mom would sit in the other room to see if she could hear me. We planned an elaborate costume using all of the poet and Renaissance clothes my mom had stockpiled over the years. In the end, I wound up dressed like a mishmash of all the men in that movie: I wore a handmade black poet shirt, black pants, a black bandanna, and my mom’s handmade custom buffalo-skin boots that she’d ordered at a Ren Faire in the 80s but were forever referred to as “the Fezzik boots.” I got special permission to bring a found WWII sword as a prop and used brown eyeliner to create Inigo’s signature facial scars.
The second grade classes had a miniature talent show to select the best performances for the school-wide talent show. Class by class, we went to the stage. When it was my turn, I sat on the chair in the center of the stage and, in the immortal words of Marshall Mathers: “He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out / He’s chokin’, how, everybody’s jokin’ now / The clocks run out, times up, over, blaow.” There I sat, the words I knew so well stuck behind the lump in my throat.
Then the whispering started.
And then the tears came.
And then they started laughing.
After I’d been sitting there for a few minutes in horrible silence, my teacher came up and asked if I would like to go last. Assuming she meant last of all the second-graders, I said yes. As it turned out, she meant last of the children in our small class, which only granted me a stay of about fifteen minutes. Again, I tried to deliver the performance I had so carefully prepared. Again, I failed.
Years later, as the final sixth grade classed prepared to graduate from Maeser Elementary before it shut its doors for good, I learned that my classmates had been calling me The Crying Pirate for the last four years. Frankly, I wish they’d told me sooner: The Crying Pirate is one of the most accurate nicknames anyone has ever given me.
At work, we created an "enrichment writing" club, which basically means that we write things and share them with each other. This month, we made lists of stories from our lives and allowed coworkers to vote on which ones they wanted to hear/read. This is one of mine.
Amber Sorensen 