Thanks Crazy Lady

In recent news, I was given a potato last week. I entered my school early last Thursday to find an interesting woman sitting at the front desk speaking with our school manager. As soon as I walked through the door, the large lady whipped around and my unsuspecting ocular organs met her crazy eyes. She was a hefty set woman, with wild, black curly hair, an obtrusive pince nez resting on her protruding snozzle, and a long heavy winter jacket dangling down to her vericose vein laden, panty hose concealed (although clearly not well enough) stubby legs.

As soon as she saw me, an idea struck her head. She turned around and took a small, crumpled bag and came to me right away! She started speaking Chinese with a fiery flare before she realized I was not familiar with her dialect. I turned to my manager sympathetically, but she only shook her head and did her best to stifle a laugh. She opened the bag and took out a warm, fresh sweet potato. She handed it to me and said, in broken English, "Good, Good." I looked at the potato and said, "Mmmmm, looks delicious. I'm just going to take it with me into the other room now and eat it there. You don't have to follow me..." Oh, but she did.

Down the hall, she called out, "Good, Good!"

And I responded, "Yes, it looks good. I will eat it in here."

"GOOD, GOOD!"

I placed the potato on a napkin in the teachers room and pretended to start eating it. I usually make it a point not to eat food from strangers. Especially crazy strangers. And this stranger now came into the teachers room and whispered sensually, "Good, good."

We stared at each other with nothing to say- two souls lost in different languages. I again said, "looks good," and she then bowed and left the room.

In a few moments, I went back out to the front desk to ask my manager who this woman was. She started laughing and said, "I have no idea." That's it, I wasn't going to eat that potato at this rate. I returned to the teachers room, with the potato resting softly next to me, and got to work.

About an hour later, I went back out to the main lobby and had a near fatal heart attack when the woman was back! She was sitting quietly on the couch staring intently at me. It scared me so I went back into the teachers room and did not return. However, this fearless potato warrior followed me back to the teachers room with a different inflection to her voice and asked, "good, good?"

I told her that the potato was "good" and I thanked her very much for it. It wasn't until after I told her it was good that I realized the potato was still resting on my desk in plain view. I tried to position myself between the starched gourd from hell and this maniac. Luckily, she didn't say anything more and was off.

Turns out, she was waiting for another teacher to give the remaining potatoes to and a few tubes of medicinal hand cream. She waited over two hours for the teacher to arrive, allowing just enough time for me to get caught in the crossfire and become sufficiently freaked out.

Until my next great potato caper, from your weirded out, door locked insomniac of the pacific, Michael.