Some girls seem to be born blessed with an innate sense of propriety.
They dress just right, they dance elegantly, their grades or romantic choices are never a subject of peer discussion, no one points and laughs at them.
They do not accept invitations to host a talent show while clad in a swimsuit top and harem pants, and they certainly do not announce the show’s intermission as their own personal bathroom break.
I, on the other hand, do that. I did that. I did once say onstage to a few hundred peers, “Now we will have a fifteen minute entr’acte, and I am going to pee.”
When I was a schoolkid (i.e. when being a laughingstock mattered the worst) I often landed myself in something, or some other entity landed me in it.
Either way, I landed.
Allow me to share two personal embarrassments related to the Soviet culture and wound around my formidable 3rd Grade teacher Aleksandra Fyodorovna.
(Yes, I know that the word “wound” visually creates a syntactic maelstrom in the sentence above.)
In 3rd Grade, we were given an assignment to memorize a few stanzas of our own choosing from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “Vladimir Il’yich Lenin.” We were to recite the excerpts in class in front of everyone.
Such poem was indeed found in my home library.
I leafed through.
Fancy words caught my eye.
Fancy curly-wurly made-up words caught my eye.
The part with the fancy words began with “Capitalism, in the years of his youth, was an okay guy, a hardworking one…”
I memorized the part with the fancy words and I brought it to school in my small idiot birdmouth.
And there I stood in class, in front of thirty ten-year-olds, singing a tale of capitalism’s spoliation:,
“He built a palace/ Which makes the mind boggle/ More painters than one/ Have crawled over its walls/ Its floors are Empire-ic/ Its ceilings Rococcal/ Its walls are Louis the Fourteenth/ the Quartorze!”
Aleksandra Fyodorovna the teacher and assigner of Mayakovsky poems looked at me like a chicken.
Really, the expression of her eyes and the tilt of her neck were chicken-like.
The kids around me were like, WTF?
I went on: “It’s surrounded by mugs which are of a piece/ With both faces and butt-cheeks/ The ass-faced police!”
Sit down, Anya. Maybe be normal next time, and pick something properly didactic.
Sit down.
Next!
Next, we had a school-wide Marching and Singing Parade.
For those innocent: the Marching and Singing Parade is an annual school-wide event in which each class puts on Parade uniforms, names itself via the teaching staff’s suggestions after a Soviet war hero, and marches around the school gym shouting out cadences, waving flags, drumming drums and being alternately at attention and at ease.
What’s this tight-knit marching group?
It’s our Young Pioneer troop!
Sound off! Soviet!
Sound off! Union!
(I made up the last two lines in this marching cadence just now.)
Aleksandra Fyodorovna the teacher and taskmaster appointed me to carry the flag of our troop during the Parade.
Trouble is, we were not Young Pioneers yet in 3rd Grade.
We were pre-Pioneers, October Kids, and so we were not yet technically marching fodder. We were admitted into the Pioneer and Komsomol Parade through some odd decision of the teaching staff.
Our school’s staff seemed to be quite into all things military; I mean, a year before the fateful Parade they had shown us, second-graders, WWI documentary reels illustrating the effects of nerve gases on human physiology.
(I am still unable to sleep.)
So we the weetle October Kids were to march in the school-wide Parade, which apparently posed issues for Aleksandra Fyodorovna.
She decided that we had to march differently, to indicate that we were not full-grown marchers yet.
Specifically,  she instructed me not to carry the red flag vertically, like the Pioneers did.
I was to carry the flag at a slant.
And so I did.
What did I know?
Didn’t know any different.
I marched out with the half-lowered flag, leading the troop behind me into
a gym full of finger-points and sneering laughter.
Apparently, carrying the flag lowered is a giant marching faux-pas.
The flag HAS to be upright UNLESS it’s a funerary procession.
And no Soviet leader happened to die or be interred that day.
They laughed, and teased, and laughed, and teased, for days, and weeks, and months.
“Did you think you were at a funeral? What a moron! Who died? Moron! Sound off! Ha-ha! Sound off! Moron!”
I don’t know if Aleksandra Fyodorvna got upbraided in the teacher’s lounge afterwards, for trotting out a ten-year-old with a funerary flag during a joyous Soviet occasion, but she never did apologize to me for wrecking what little social cred I had.
I got moved to a new school after the elementary. That school, too, had Marching Parades. In one, I stood at ease; I overheard whispers behind me:
“In this other school, this one stupid chick marched out with the flag lowered! — No shit! Ha-ha! What a moron!”
Sit down, Anya.
Sit down.