One of our yearly Gifted rituals was “Independent Studies”. Independent Studies was the educational term for “pick something you’re interested and go learn about it.” These studies often lasted an entire nine-week period and culminated with some sort of big project and presentation (something that could be graded).

My Shedeck Gifted teacher, Mrs. Leatherwood, had also been my Gifted teacher at my previous school as well. In fact, I’d had Mrs. Leatherwood for gifted since 2nd grade, so she’d had just about all the independent studies from me covering Bigfoot, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster and the Bermuda Triangle that she could take. I can’t remember if I was presented a list to choose from or just given some friendly suggestions, but I remember being encouraged in some fashion to “pick something else” to study. Somehow, I ended up picking “music”.

The projects that were to be completed at the end of each independent study were chosen from a list. Usually there were five or six and you had to choose a couple to complete. One of the ones I picked involved making a medley that covered “the history of music”. That sounded like fun, so I picked that. My mom helped me go through all of her old records and despite the pretty archaic technology (a record player and a cassette recorder) we came up with a pretty interesting mix of songs. It started with a song from the 20s, “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye,” and ended with Quiet Riot’s version of “Come On Feel the Noise”. I had snippets of music in there from the 40s, 50s, 60s … pretty much every decade. The whole thing was three or four minutes long, and if I do say so myself, was pretty well done.

The funny part of this story isn’t really the medley I made — it was what else was on the tape, or more importantly, what I had taped over. In 1983 Motley Crue’s Shout at the Devil was released. My neighbor’s older brother was really into heavy metal, and he had dubbed copies of the album for a few of us. In the spring of 1984 I had purchased an original of the tape and I no longer needed the copy my neighbor had made me, so I taped my little mix tape song over the beginning of it. At the end of my song I had recorded about ten seconds of silence, signifying that my work was over.

The big day came and I brought the tape containing my song, my ghetto blaster, and a pair of headphones for Mrs. Leatherwood. I hooked everything up, pressed play, and went and sat down. I saw her smile a couple of times. “Probably remembering old songs,” I thought to myself. I went back to working on whatever I was doing. Time passed. When I looked up I saw the strangest look on Mrs. Leatherwood’s face. She looked like she had eaten a raw lemon. Maybe even a rotten one. “What part of my mix didn’t she like?” I wondered.

I walked up to Mrs. Leatherwood’s desk and from the headphones I could hear Motley Crue’s song “Bastard” blaring from the speakers. My medley was long over. While the song I made had written over the song “Shout at the Devil”, Mrs. Leatherwood had somehow made it all the way through song two (“Looks that Kill”) and was deep into song number three, “Bastard,” a happy little ditty with lyrics like “Out go the lights/In goes my knife/Pull out his life/Consider that bastard dead.” The only thing that saved me from going to the principal’s office that day is that fact that I doubt Mrs. Leatherwood could understand any of the lyrics.

“Ooookay, that’s the end of that,” I said, removing the headphones from her ears. I remember her making a comment to the effect of, “you really went for the heavy stuff there at the end, how interesting.” Somehow I doubt Mrs. Leatherwood, one of the nicest ladies in the annals of teaching, found Motley Crue “interesting,” but there ya go. I don’t think I ever explained the faux pas to Mrs. Leatherwood, either.