And now, by popular demand, is the next episode in the life and times of this prairie child. Are you still with me?
Remember, when I was 17 - expelled from my rural boarding school at Briercrest, I returned to the capital city of Regina, Saskatchewan for grade 12 at big Balfour Collegiate. I was so unsophisticated. So unused to the unreligious kids with their fashionable clothes and clever modern slang.
But I loved Mr. McVeety's Shakespeare class and adored Miss Meade's charcoal drawing - and I hated algebra.
I was cast as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet in the senior play but my stern and 'godly' parents refused to let me act - "too worldly" they warned. Cruelly disappointed, I entered the provincial Bryant Oratorical Contest with a little essay called: Poetry and Music.
I explored how dream and reality merge in Conrad Aiken's lyrical lines:
"There are houses hanging above the stars
And stars hung under a sea -
And a sun far off in a shell of silence
Dapples my walls for me --
To explore poetry and music as ways of expressing the otherwise unexpressable depth and complexity of human thoughts and dreams - I used this excerpt from Aiken's -
House of Dust:
"Once, on a sunbright morning, I walked in a certain hallway, trying to find a certain door; I found one, tried it, opened, and there in a spacious chamber, brightly lighted, a hundred men played music, loudly, swiftly, while one tall woman sent her voice above them in powerful sweetness . . .
Closing the door I heard it die behind me, fade to a whisper -- and walked in a quiet hallway as before.
Just such a glimpse, as thru' that opened door, is all we know of those we call our friends. We hear sudden music, see a playing of ordered thought -- and all again is silence. The music, we suppose, (as in ourselves), goes on forever there, behind shut doors. As it continues after our departure, so, we divine, it played before we came.
What do you know about me -- or I of you? Little enough -- We set the doors ajar only for chosen movements of the music."
I actually won that contest.

I remember myself as very shy then.
I'm not sure how I emerged at all among those hundreds of students.
Later that year I was toastmisstress for the Senior Banquet.

I didn't think about it then, but I guess the public speaking thing was "in my blood".
My great uncle and several cousins were theatre people and my father and brother were ministers. At boarding school, and even as a younger child, I told lots of stories, mostly made-up or silly ones.
Looking back at grade 12 in the big sinful city, I see that I was willing to risk failure and parental disapproval to release my natural storyteller.
Once again my 'defiant creativity' found ways to express itself!
p.s. Notice, above, that my Senior Banquet was at the somewhat famous Hotel Saskatchewan. The following year, to earn money while at Bible College (you heard me!) I had a part-time job as an elevator operator at that fine hotel - where I actually got to 'drive' Prince Phillip up to the penthouse in my elevator. Alas, Queen Elizabeth was taken up by the head operator :(
STAY TUNED!