When I was in 3rd grade, I had a very special lady in my life who I was certain I was going to marry: Olivia Newton-John. There was only one thing in our way, and that was my 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Hauser. If it weren’t for her, Olivia and I would be skipping through the grassy fields of Australia hand in hand with the koala bears and kangaroos to this day, methinks.

You see, what happened is I had a picture I clipped out of People Magazine that I carried around with me. It was this picture (thank you, internet):

Hoo haaa! Anyways, one day I decided I couldn’t make it through the school day without her, so I folded Olivia up and took her to school with me. I placed her in my desk where she sat until after lunch break when I decided to take a peek. I lifted up my desk lid and said hello, how do you do, what would you like to do after school today, and whatever impurities were racing through my 3rd grade mind at that time. I had never wanted to be a dead tree so badly in my life. I wondered what she was looking at when that picture was taken. Probably me sipping a chocolate milk. Yeah, she was looking at me.. and … next thing I knew…

“Michael, what are you looking at?”

dooooooooooooh no. It was my teacher Mrs. Hauser snapping my ass back into the real world. Her voice was like a cold splash of water to the nether regions, if you know what I’m sayin’. I was busted. She snatched the picture out of my hands, crumpled it up, and threw it in the garbage. My one and only Olivia picture other than my sister’s Grease LP cover which I certainly couldn’t take, because she’d notice it was missing. Olivia was gone for good, but not forgotten.

I spent the last hour or two of the day thinking maybe I’d try to go rescue it. The garbage was right beneath the pencil sharpener, and I could easily fake going up there to sharpen a pencil and try to intercept my People Porn. Maybe as we put our coats on at the end of the day I could grab it when no one was looking. Hmm…

It didn’t happen. I chickened out. When you’re a kid, a mean old biddy like a school teacher is not someone you want to piss off. That was that – I never saw that picture again up until I remembered that incident this morning. It put a damper on the whole Olivia thing for me, and because of that I never ended up with her.

Thanks for ruining my life, Mrs. Hauser.