2012

Season Three of the Harper Junior High News.

Still running with the full name moniker of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in the news title. This would be the last year Marque would be involved in the program as much as me. Next school year after he graduates he takes a break for a small period of time before returning as a paraeducator instead of campus safety.

This is a strange year in the regards that I just remember it running smoothly. We had all the setup of the first two years and just rolled out episodes. That hardest part at the beginning of the year was just managing Mickey and Jackson’s over zealousness. Just having to remind them we didn’t have big movie budget and couldn’t blow things up.

Probably the biggest contribution this season would give the rest of the years was news anchors. We had used anchors before, but Justin and Alia’s episode where we decided to bridge everything together with anchors was so well received it became a focal point for the future, including anchor auditions, where in students would work in groups to be able to anchor the Harper News.

While still a work in progress at this time and kneeling on the floor, Alia would pick a Final Fantasy VIII track that she said sounded like a news background that would stick in all future broadcasts. Eventually we would replace channel 9 eyewitness news with our own looping footage of our control room in the back.

So, let’s rapid fire some of the most memorable parts of this season. Matthew and his Mr. Show set, I think this was actually the first time we setup a talk show set as an alternative arrangement on the studio. Eventually this model would get refined to a non green screen set on the opposite side of the studio from the green screen to offer some non-chroma keyed on-set pieces.

We branched out into having a cooking segment. Which was a lot of prep work, but fun to be able to help them mix in some of what I was doing at Claudine’s with the kids, since one of the girls was vegan, so vegan tacos!

Alia, who had great fun in the class that year, most spectacularly did a history, epic rap battles spoof, where she played both characters, once again upping what the kids were doing with the chroma key set from years prior.

Then we have my poor car that starred in an add for the carwash, where I let the kids muddy up the car for the advertisement, then had them spend forever cleaning the mess they made.

Then Marques big push to have some episodes in Spanish. We had one episode early on where we had a second audio version with all the segments translated and dubbed over in Spanish. Then we had a later episode with a skit done in Spanish. It was for the dance, somehow, but it featured our non-Spanish speaking cast with Spanish dialog written by our Spanish speaking students. It was a story involving daughters, peanut farms and lightsabers. It was something else, in the image above we see our hero, I think he was the hero, removing the mustache of our villain.

Having the kids do some many things out of their elements actually made this quite a long setup and deliver segment for that episode. It’s funny as cheap as it all looks, the work put into getting there was sometimes tremendous, this was one of those times.

Because this would be Marques last year, this season is sort of the culmination too of the Ryan/Marque editions of the Harper News (as we see they had shortened it too for the anchor screen). Starting next year, I would have the same work load that we both took on for this and prior seasons. Luckily with the refinement of what was working and what wasn’t, the transition wasn’t too bad. Plus I always tried to let some of Marques traits live on through the process, but this was the last year he would work directly with the kids on their projects.

I also start doing some of the committee moral projects. Fifth period, which if I recall eventually I had to do without much time with Marque around got the Star Wars poster, later casts got others, some projects didn’t get as finished as others. We definitely had an avengers-esque one I worked on that never got finished featuring a lot more students. That is good to keep in mind since the super hero idea would stick around.

Utkarsh, had to take the Vader role, so I just snuck in the LSU from his hat on the helmet, the rest of them we tried to make comic versions of Star Wars toons for them. Hannah Solo being the name that worked the best.

In the world away from work, this was the tail end of the year we were going to go to Texas and help Mom out with Dad. Since the prior trip when I came for a short period of time but took him to ballgames and did some Wii bowling Dad was getting pretty excited.

The new year would start off pretty well. Chris R, Karl and I had saved up some winnings from our Monday Night football promotions at The Grad and decided to expend it on a playoff game. With some push from me, but oddly not a lot we picked the Saturday afternoon Divisional round game between the Niners and the Saints.

Little did we realize how good of an idea that would be. The game is probably one of the more memorable division round games in NFL history. It was a solid game to go watch with a crowd or home town fans. In fact it was a good enough experience we decided to return the next week for the Championship game against the New York Giants.

I will openly admit, to this day I still haven’t watched the live broadcast with audio to find out what overturned New York’s fumble in the last minute before a commercial break that changed the course of the crowd at The Graduate. Because I will forever remember watching the replay of their running back fumble the ball, everyone realize the Niners just had to sit on a knee and kick a game winning field goal.  A two minute ad break with an elated crowd, only to come back from break to see the Giants running another play from scrimmage after somehow the refs managed to rule the ball dead on the field and I guess not make it eligible for replay.

Of course a non-blown dead fumble would give the Giants that win in overtime. And for me that was the end of a pretty fun season to watch. I didn’t see the Super Bowl at all and moved on with the next phase of the new year.

What that was, I don’t totally remember. Claudine needed me out, but since the decision had been made to go to Texas for the summer, Mom called around and got me staying with more family friends. The Pearson’s who had let me stay for a few days when my appendix had come out a few years prior, had an extra room and were fine with me camping out there for a couple months before I went off to help Mom and Dad over the summer.

While this was nice, April would see really one of the worst days and ominous shadows over the march of time in my life. While I will probably expand on this more later, one Friday afternoon I would come home from work, talk to Addie in the kitchen, tell her I hadn’t seen her husband yet since I got off work, go back to fire up my laptop, and then fifteen minutes later find her grandson (a student at my school) running down the hall way, going out back seeing Larry pulling his wife from the pool and seeing that the sirens I heard outside were coming to house.

The rest of that day was weird feeling. There was the police asking the grandson questions since he found his grandma in the pool. Eventually I felt like I was in another family’s situation so bad I should figure something out. I tried calling my mother, with no luck. Eventually I got a text from Mom that still to this day I don’t think I read every word of. I started off with being taken to the hospital and ended with they won’t let me leave until my heart rate fixes and Dad isn’t in her care.

After watching one of my family’s long time friends pass away now I find out mom is being held in the hospital and Dad is getting evicted so that the doctors will let her think of coming home. The next few days were strange. Cindy was stuck as the only one close enough to deal with the Dad situation. Someone had to go over there and watch him while Mom was in the ER. Now someone had to move him out of the house so Mom could come home. Having a 70 year old kid you have to trick into a retirement home is no task anymore should have to do. But it got done.

Suddenly though we had another month or more of work to go, and my summer plans, which just recently seemed some noble with how excited Dad was that I was coming to hang out with him, had changed into be having nowhere to be, but now I needed to come to Texas and help Mom find a permanent setup for Dad.

Luckily one can bounce around for a month without to much hassle. I did some time with Jim and Jackie, Claudine opened her doors again since this was such a extreme set of circumstances and I would get through the end of the year.

 

I would clean up some stuff at the studio, and promptly that Friday after school let out I was on a plane to become a Texan until the end of August.

 

One of the things we had to do after moving Dad was give him time to adjust. So the week after moving him, instead of visiting him I took Mom on a drive of Texas to visit some of the landmarks she hadn’t had a chance to since most of the time they had been in Texas was focused on Dad’s needs.

We hit up the Alamo, Nasa and a string of Zoos all in a nifty little drive up and down the interstates to go between Dallas -> San Antonio -> Houston and back again.

So, I for now I should make note of the boys. Octopus and Bear. The two secret family members and who came to stay with Mom during the summer when we had all the stuff to do with Dad.

Bear has been a family fixture since the 90s. Here he is on strike during Christmas of 1998. He unfortunately seems to have passed away with Mom in 2020.

Octo, while newer, joining us in the 00’s via Fry’s electronics, became Bear’s best friend and helped Mom through a hard go of things during the 10s and luckily has managed to live on.

By the end of the Summer in Texas, I had sent in a few apartment applications from the Dining room where I setup office. But near the end of trying to figure out what would work states away Jim called with a proposition. Jim and Jackie were losing their extra roommate and wanted me to come take over that section of the lease with them. So this time when coming back from Texas I was just going to move into the C street house with the two of them, and not have to stay with them while I exhaustively looked for new housing.

Life at the C street house with follow two chapters that almost perfectly line up with the next two school years. This year, 2012-13, while will have a difficult chapter in the beginning of the new year, will be what I would expect from living with them if told ahead of time that was the plan. Year two, will be drastically different on so many fronts and really symbolizes the transition between the transition years 2008-2013 and sort of my modern adult life to this point (2023).