Bobo's Bad Habit

Last week I featured a photo of the St. Mary's marching band from the 1968 Renard.  This photo comes from the same yearbook and it caught my attention because I was intimately familiar with the above subject, named Bobo by Sister Mary Evelyn, stalwart biology teacher for many years at the school.  Now, my experience with Bobo came some five years later during sophomore biology class.  During a lesson on the 206 bones in the human body, the fire alarm bell sounded and we all dutifully left the classroom and the school, assembling someplace down the line on the sidewalk, a good ways away from the school.  When we returned to the class and the lesson, Sister Evelyn opened the locker which housed Bobo and discovered Bobo with an unlit cigarette between his teeth.   Needless to say, Sister Evelyn was not pleased as the class erupted into the largest guffaw you could imagine.  And pleas for the culprit to expose himself went unheeded.  Thankfully, she didn't punish the whole class, but somehow restored a modicum of calm as she took the offending butt out of his teeth and went on with the lesson.  We never did find out who did it, and I often wondered what a better prank it would have been if it had been a lit cigarette that Bobo was smoking, though that might have put poor Sister Evelyn over the edge. With all the strictures of that parochial environment, one tended to take his joys in little things like that.  Someday, I'll tell you the tale of how one particular priest took exception of my classmate's singing before class "Lydia the Tattooed Lady," a song featured in the Marx Brothers' movie, "At the Circus."  Yup, I was the guy who had taught him the song, but I didn't get in trouble.  I mean, come on, in a place like that, you have to be aware of what you can get away with.