Yesterday, while I was reading different blogs, I discovered that Jeana over at Days to Come, had written about a dream she had about Dr. Phil, which was so weird because that same night I had a very real dream in which Boomama emailed me to let me know how to properly DVR the Montel show. It seems that I had been missing the first twenty minutes of Montel and she had the answer as to why.
I’m not sure anyone has the answer as to why Jeana and I are having dreams about third rate talk show hosts.
Let me state for the record, that in real life, I don’t actually watch the Montel show. I also feel fairly safe in saying that Boomama doesn’t either. That’s just a guess on my part, so if I’m wrong, she can let me know.
It amazes me how things like that creep into my subconcious. Okay, it makes sense that Boomama popped up in a dream because we do email back and forth on occasion, but Montel?
In all fairness, Montel and I do go way back because he spoke at an assembly at my high school during my junior year. They brought him in to ease tensions due to a “race riot” in my school cafeteria.
I attended high school in Beaumont, Texas, and due to the fact that Beaumont is a little behind the times by about thirty or forty years, the high schools had only been desegregated for about four years and this was in the late ’80’s. In truth, all of the students were fine with it and there weren’t any problems. However, the media (and I use that term loosely) in Beaumont was always looking for a good story about race relations.
At my high school, there were two different lines in the cafeteria; the hot lunch line and the a la carte line. The a la carte line was always the more popular choice because they served the best burritos ever. Seriously, they were these crunchy burritos with chili sauce and I’d eat one with a side of fries every day because I was sixteen and at a point in life where I was still acquainted with my metabolism.
The only problem with the burritos, other than an unbelievably high fat content that is probably affecting all of my classmates’ cholesterol levels to this day, is that they tended to run out of them. This meant that there was always a race to get to the a la carte line.
Well, one day, Antoine (who happened to be black) and Keith (who happened to be white) got into a fight over who was in line first. Due to the fact that they were high school boys overflowing with testosterone, the fight escalated and turned into pretty much a full blown cafeteria food fight. If memory serves, I think our vice-principal might have gotten pushed over a table. It was not a pretty scene, yet it was not a race riot, it was a burrito riot.
Word spread like wildfire and next thing we knew, all the media had shown up at the school to interview students about the “race riot” in the cafeteria. Of course, since we were teenagers and looking for any kind of fame, we lined up to talk about the incident. I’ll never forget our head cheerleader, Maggie, talking to Gail at Channel 4 news and saying, “I was like, so scared. Food was like, flying everywhere”.
Really, the only thing anyone was scared of was not getting a burrito for lunch.
One thing led to another and eventually the school administration decided to bring in Montel to ease the tensions caused by the burrito riot. Of course, the student body was totally fine, but the school officials were feeling the heat to do something, when really the best thing they could have done was up the order for burritos.
So, Montel came to the school and gave a speech that I can’t tell y’all anything about, except that he kept saying “MOUNTAIN, get out of my way” and none of us really knew what that had to do with anything, but from then on the lunchroom was filled with peace, harmony and plenty of burritos with chili sauce.
It’s no wonder he got his own talk show.