Bella T

Dog Drama

            When I was little, I loved to act. The world was my stage, and I was always putting on a show, playing some character wherever I went. I wore costumes all the time, and sometimes spent a whole day as a cat or genie or princess without breaking character. If my parents were taking me somewhere, it was a struggle to get me out of my costume, so sometimes I was a lion out at restaurants or when we went to visit family. No matter where I was or who I was with, it was all a big show, and I was the star. I thought that my performances were so great that everyone would want to see them, so naturally I caused a few scenes out in public. After one particular act, however, I figured out that being a drama queen was not always the best idea.

            On special days, my Grandma would take me out on and we would go somewhere like an aquarium, a zoo, or to the beach. On this occasion, my Grandma took me on a day out to a natural history museum. I was well-behaved all day, looking at but not touching the exhibits just like she had asked me to. Everything was so huge and old in the museum it made me feel tiny. We went through all of the life-size dinosaurs, which scared me a little bit but were still fun to look at. One of my favorite parts of the museum to explore was a jungle area that was set up so you could walk through it as if you were walking through a real jungle. There were brightly colored plants, a little stream with strange-looking fish, and monkeys in the trees. “Those are some very well trained monkeys”, my grandma said jokingly, “they stay so still!” As a gullible 4-year-old I believed her, and told most of the people in the museum about this amazing discovery. No one had the heart to tell me that they weren’t real monkeys. After that, we made it to the top of the museum, where there was an outdoor area where kids could dig in sandboxes and find toy fossils and bones. I dug and dug only to be disappointed with plastic bones, not the impressive dinosaur skeleton I was expecting to unearth.  After digging for a while, I went to look at the exhibits they had set up around the sandboxes as examples of what paleontologists find in the dirt. I was looking at the skeleton from some kind of coyote, which looked a lot different from the rest of the dinosaurs, so I asked my grandma to explain what it was. “It’s sort of like a dog, but it lived a long time ago,” she clarified. That’s when my acting switch flicked on.

 I threw myself on the cold glass case and started wailing “NOOOOOO! My poor dead doggie, I loved my doggie! Why did you have to go away, doggie?” I screamed and pretended to weep and drew a crowd. Normally, you would get kicked out by security guards for doing something like this, but they didn’t even try to get me to stop. The scene must have been terrible for them, some poor child bawling and shrieking about her poor dead puppy, hugging the display tightly. “Why doggie? I miss my doggie! No, doggie!” I continued to cry. The thing is, I had never even owned a dog. I was only playing a character that once had a dog, just for fun. To make the scene even worse, my grandma, who knew that I was joking around for my own amusement, was laughing her head off. No one else knew that I was just acting, so they looked at her with disgust, thinking that she was getting a laugh out of a little girl’s sadness. She tried to explain the situation, but was laughing so hard that she couldn’t get the words out. We had to leave the museum a bit earlier than expected.

Even though this experience was not as fun as I intended it to be, I did learn an important life lesson; it’s never good to be a drama queen. I still enjoy acting, but after this incident I learned not to perform in public because not everyone can appreciate ‘theatrical genius’.