Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch: Teachers' Political Forum Looms

Group of Attendees at the Women's Political March for Choice in DC, to which a million came. I asked the Park Police on horses why there were no park-police women on horses at a women's march. Chauvinists on horses are always polite to grannies with a mop of white hair.

Correction!

Well, heck. This takes the sauce out of my day. I thought a great, gawdy anti-First Amendment measure had been promulgated by the board and Elia. I thought I could go for succor to the ACLU again. The villainy of the moment is at too low an ebb for my taste. What’s duller than archiving old emails? But we can commence sending subversive messages over the school emails and invitations to the Teachers’ Forum.

The problem is that Ms. Elia doesn’t have the talent for superbly bad conduct. Real evil takes talent. And God knows the board is not up to high-level bad behavior with its lower-quartile brains. I did not keep the story in-house. Give me the day’s Ditz Award. I sent it to several press with a hey nonny nony. Now I am sorry I called Mr. Tash an ectopic endomorph.

Aw well, as Scarlett, my role model and that of all Georgia girls, says, “Tomorrow is another day.” Lee

From: Thomas Vaughan [mailto:vaughan88@verizon.net]
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2008 3:51 PM
To: lee
Subject: Re: ?

Lee

I read recently where they were archiving old emails. That is the only email maintenance I know of.

Tom

Ms. Cobbe: What is the name of the device that I understand Ms. Elia ordered to put a hold on the email for the schools? How much did it cost? Does it entail extra personnel to run it? Who strains the emails? Does the board have a written rationale for its need, or does Ms. Elia?I would like to have a copy.

Thank you. ldd

We'Minions of the Light have got a problem. We are having a teachers' problem-solving political forum on August 15th at the Columbia Restaurant.

But Ms. Elia is so eager to control anything about the schools that she is putting a strainer on the email system at midnight tonight (June 2) that stops all emails and stores them for four days until the ROSSAC cops can determine if they are subversive to Ms.
Elia's beatific reputation. How they will do this remains a mystery.

Since I have a congenitally rebellious and criminal mind, I bethought myself to rush our invitations (done by one of the Minions of the Light, Holly, as fast as she could) into the school emails before 12 midnight tonight so that invitations to the Teacher Forum would be snugly parked in the individual teacher email kitties when they walk into their offices at the beginning of the semester.

My husband strolled by the computer and said, "Why aren't you watching Hardball?"

I explained to him my scheme.

"Well, aren't you going to mess up your forum plan?"

"What plan do you mean?" I asked.

"The one you have there in the invitation," quoth he.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"The plan to get Ms. Elia and others of the Loyal Opposition to come to the Teachers' Forum. They will get pissed and won't come if you sabotage the email-system shutdown," he said.

"Would they be such party-poopers?" I asked.

"Are you kidding?" he asked. "Aren't these the characters who savaged that poor creature Erwin because he whisltleblew their ongoing in-house graft? Didn't they interrogate him until he was blithering?"

"Yes," quoth I. "I think the court papers said they stretched him out on a table and didn't stop grilling him until Mr. Erwin had lapsed into the blithering state."

"Have you dug up the parking lot to see how many teacher bodies they have interred there yet?" Have you noticed many classrooms without a teaching person up in the front of the room?" he inquired.

"Oh, woe," I said. "You don't think the ROSSAC ghouls are capable of knocking off and burying teachers in parking lots underneath the macadam?" I quivered.

"They're capable of anything. You told me that not once but a thousand times," said my spouse of 52 mostly stressful years.

"My lord, you are right," I answered. "That 'My lord' is not direct address, dear. It's a mild interjection."

I have not lived with a teacher for 52 years without knowing a sentence backwards and forewards," he said. "I even know the pluperfect past participial loop-de-loop gerundial thing-a-ma-jiggy."

"There's no such thing," I replied.

"Yes, there is," he said. "It's a little ditty that has come out since you stopped keeping up with language and immersing yourself in fending off the Powers of Darkness. You'd better
get off the computer and start thinking of some non-lethal way to get out the news about the Teachers' Forum besides sabataging the computer system in the vile environs of
ROSSAC."

I answered with a clause that I have not seen it necessary to employ many times in the last 52 years:

"You know, you may be right, dear," I said.

"You bet your life I am," said my husband.

"Oh, don't use that phrase," I quavered.

"Then get your noggin into a non-criminal mode and think of some way to advertise the Teachers' Forum that does not trip the murder synapses in the left ventricle of the noggins of the ROSSAC gang," advised my old man.

So get your thinking caps on, Casting-Room-Couch readers. Tell me how we of the Minions of Light get out to the teachers the gladsome tidings about the Political Forum by August 15. Don't rest until an idea of genius arrives on this subject and you have passed it on to the kid here.

I don't do that kind of thinking. I never could conjugate regular French verbs. But I was hell on wheels with the irregular ones.

Any ideas will get grateful acceptance. Accompany them with your RSVP to the Teacher Forum hoedown. lee

Holly, one of the minions of the light, did our invation.

Teachers’ Political Forum

Ask everything you want to know at the Teachers’ Political Forum!

We invited School Board members, candidates, and Superintendent Mary Ellen Elia .

Time: Friday, August 15, 2008 at 5pm

Place: The Columbia Restaurant; the King's Room

2117 East 7th Avenue
Tampa, Florida 33605

Price: $18.50 Cash bar, sangria, and tapas

Special Guests:

Tampa Tribune

CTA Officials

ROSSAC Personnel

School Board Members

School Board Candidates

Patrick Manteiga La Gaceta publisher

Teachers: Let your voice be heard, Now is the time to solicit responses from those who set the professional and political climate of Hillsborough County’s Public Schools. Ask about issues concerning the teaching profession including, but not limited to: