“I had a teacher in college who was in love with Dracula and Lugosiâs version of him.
This dude was so pumped when our class got to Dracula. He brought in a Lugosi doll, a Dracula knife, a bunch of his Dracula stuff. He always wore a black hat and a capey sort of jacket, and he walked with a cane that I am 100% convinced had a sword in it.
He made the classic English teacher mistake: because he loved something so much, he mightâve oversold it. More than a little.
He also REALLY hated when I read the role of Puck in Midsummer Nightâs Dream in class.
This was the second mistake made by many English teachers: letâs read a play out loud.
Yea, verily, they are meant for the stage! But the gulf between reading a play and watching it on stage is much smaller than the gulf between a barely-there class of apathetic students stumbling through it and seeing it performed.
He didnât like my Puck because, well, I was going apeshit on it. Just make ing everything a broad joke. But it was all I could think to do. It was SO BORING and everyone was being SO BORING. I donât like to give myself credit for too many things, but I do think I sort of trainwrecked that read aloud in the best possible way. Was it as Shakespeare intended? Probs not. But did other students start going for it with all the skill of a donkey sewing sequins on a prom dress? Yepper.
There was a vote taken in the class for best actors and so on, a fun addition, and yours truly totally won.
We got two free absences, and I took one of mine on the last day because Iâd honestly forgotten the award would be given that day. I felt like a real asshole for doing that, to be honest.
But now Iâm trainwrecking a review of a Lugosi comic to apologize: Dr. Worley, you were right to being in all your Dracula shit and make an attempt to infect us with your enthusiasm. If I taught a class and we read John Swartzwelder books, Iâd do the same, jealous of these students who are about to experience it for the first time. “