A Personal Funny

When I was 19 years old, I was a chaperone for 50 inner city high schoolers from Des Moines on a cultural trip to Minneapolis. It was a long drive. Most of them slept through the Shakespearean play. We stayed at a hotel. As the other female chaperone and I patrolled the halls after curfew, we smelled something funny. My partner recognized it as marijuana.

I knocked on the door from which the odor emanated. No answer. I knocked again, identifying who we were, and that they had better open up, RIGHT NOW. Still no answer. I pounded on the door, telling the occupants through the closed door that they had better stop what they were doing or the hotel would kick us all out in the middle of the night, to say nothing about getting arrested. It was late. Not a peep of a response. I didn’t feel like packing up and getting 50 sleepy kids back on a bus to another state. So we went to bed.

In the morning, I checked the roster of rooms where our people stayed. I was going to really chew those girls out for being so stupid. It was then that I discovered the room I pounded on in the night was not one of the rooms on our list of kids.