Well it's official....the world has turned upside down and pigs are flying past my window. After a strange and unexpected weekend back home in DC I was expecting things to settle down and go back to normal. Apparently that was wishful thinking....
So this afternoon I went to my final Property class of the semester (thank God). The class is taught by a jovially corpulent openly gay former hippie from San Fransisco who is about as conservative as Ralph Nader. From the first day of class I knew that this was likely to be the weirdest class that I had ever been there. I remember sitting in my seat that first day, thumbing through the syllabus, when I came across an essay that looked out of place among the other sheets of paper that were filled with all the typical information, such as grading curve, required reading, etc. A quick skim of the essay's first paragraph revealed that it was an article written by my professor, apparently about himself. I had never seen something like this in a syllabus, so intrigued I began reading it carefully from the beginning. The first few sentences contained general background information about my professor and I immediately assumed that this would be some sort of self-promoting, extend biography. Then came the kicker...."And I happen to be gay." Reading that felt like a stinging smack in the face. You're gay?? Well that's great. Congratulations, but do I and the rest of the class really need to know? Apparently for some reason, unclear to me, my professor felt that we did. Personally I'm not a proponent of homosexuality but it's a personal decision and I'll respect that. But I don't really feel like having it thrown in my face, especially not by my professor in what is supposed to be a professional setting. It's not like any of the student showed up to first day of class wearing "I'm straight t-shirts." So based on this I pretty much knew that this class was going to be unlike any other that I had ever taken....
As the semester progressed none of the craziness that I was expecting ever materialized. The lone exception to the this was my professor's odd habit of playing a musical selection at the beginning of every class from the time period of the cases that we were discussing that day. Unfortunately the selections included various Elton John songs, as well as Shania Twain's "Man I Feel Like a Women." This habit, while annoying, wasn't overly bizarre and as the semester progressed he even managed to mix in some good songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. So all of this leads to today when I stepped into class expecting another boring two hour lecture with an odd musical accompaniment. And in keeping with my general trend in life, I was dead wrong....
The first 50 minutes of class were uneventful. My professor lectured and the rest of us looked on glossy-eyed and bored. I could hear occasional muttered profanity coming from the people around me as they tried desperately to get the internet to work on their computers; attempts that proved fruitless due to an apparent internet outage. Drew, sitting to my right, doodled in his notebook. Bill, sitting to Drew's right, was doing the same. Two girls sitting in front of me played games on their laptops, one unsuccessfully searching for mines in minesweeper. The other lazily moving cards around in solitaire. Meanwhile I was in the midst of a hot streak in free cell, winning four in row. And that's how the first half of class ended. We had our usual ten minute break and then returned to class. More muttering was heard as people discovered, much to their dismay, that the internet was still down. Bored with free cell and minesweeper I just sat staring blankly out the window, reliving last night's improbable softball upset, as my professor lectured about the American Dream of owning property, a topic not covered on the final exam. Suddenly, and to my extreme delight, that comforting buddy list popped up on my screen as the internet kicked back into gear. I was back in business. So I spent the next few minutes checking my fantasy baseball team and posting messages on a Redskins forum about how stupid that day's trade was. At this point, along with just about every other person in the class, I had stopped paying attention to what was going on in class and was completely oblivious to what my professor was saying. And then it happened. All of a sudden I heard singing. Yes, singing! For some inexplicable reason, my professor was loudly and excitedly singing Stephen Sondheim's,"The Road You Didn't Take" and "Giants in the Sky", as if he was on a Broadway stage during a Saturday evening performance of a popular musical, and not in a law school classroom. Looking around you could see the shocked expressions and dropped jaws of my fellow classmates. For approximately 15 minutes we all sat there, motionless and silent. A few stifled giggles could be heard every few secondsas we observed the strangest classroom behavior that we had ever seen. Several times the entire class broke out laughing, usually when my professor's voice cracked during a high note. Yet he kept singing, and signing, and singing. Finally he stopped. Not knowing how to react we sat motionless as my professor composed himself. And then he began reading a poem, during which he began crying. He continued reading for what felt like an eternity, crying more. Finally he stopped, and without another word, grabbed his things and quickly walked out of class as the rest of us just sat there, wondering if we were asleep in class and dreaming or if this had actually just transpired. A few people clapped as my professor walked out. And so ended perhaps the strangest moment of my life. I'm guessing that I'll never experience anything like this again. Thankfully. So a class that began with a bizarre manifesto ended with a twist usually seen in an Oliver Stone movie, not a law school classroom.....
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