The instruction for Day 21 of the 30-Day Writing Challenge:
“…Your character's dream in life is to be a celebrity. He/she is not particularly talented or successful at anything, so he/she will have to find a different way to become famous...”
Ever since I heard Miss Pansegrouw, our career guidance advisor, in my first year at high school explain our options in life, I have been dead keen on becoming a “celebrity.” Although that was a quite a number of years ago in the early sixties, I can still clearly hear the options she gave.
She said, “You can become (1) a graduate professional like a lawyer or a doctor, (2) a salesman or shop assistant, (3) a tradesman like a plumber or electrician, (4) a celebrity like a politician or a singer or a film star or (5) you could simply just keep on failing and become a bum or a convict, the choice is yours. The girls have fewer choices by becoming a nurse or a teacher or a housewife. Don’t bother about anything else, the men either won’t let you do it, or they’ll pay you practically next to nothing.”
My grades were not particularly marvellous, so going to University and getting a degree to slot into option number 1 would simply not happen. Option 2, in my opinion, was probably the pits -- and I predicted way back then that shops would become self-service and even mail order catalogue. I am not keen on hard manual labour, so getting my hands dirty like a tradesman was also out of the question. That left only options 4 and 5. I could never imagine becoming a drunken hobo, so, by a simple process of elimination, it was quite obvious that I would become a celebrity. Precisely what branch of celebritydom would best suit my area of expertise was not clear.
Having established my career category, I set about trying to list all the jobs I could hope to get under this heading. Clearly a celebrity is generally recognised by a group of people of a particular culture, while a national or world-wide celebrity would be recognised by a particular country or internationally respectively. So I needed to do stuff which would make me famous.
I started making a list of celebrity jobs. The more I thought of what I could add, the more I added totally unsuitable jobs. I would not be doing anything academic, as my grades indicated that I would be far more useful in other spheres.
Sport-related stuff was not worth considering, as I was hopeless with ball games or bat games, or athletic-type running or jumping or fighting – in fact I couldn’t do any sport – the co-ordination just wouldn’t come to me.
On the stage, I was hopeless at play acting. I tied a bit singing, but off-key seemed to be my middle name.I tried dancing, but it is uncanny how similar dancing is to many sports.
I quite school and went to finish my high school lectures at a cram-school. One wintry evening I was sitting at the local student pub having a beer and chatting to a mate about how he saw his future, and where one could possibly find a job.
He concluded, “Well, it seems that you cannot really do any work which may be on offer. There is still one avenue you could explore, you know… politics… you could become Town Clerk, or Mayor, or Member of Parliament, or Prime Minister or even President of the World!”
From that moment, I knew that I was destined to become a politician celebrity. Like any profession, newcomers need to start at the bottom and work their way up, and politics is no different, so I’ve landed myself a cushy job as trainee meter reader. Once I have qualified, who knows how high I can go?
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The brief for Day 22 reads: “ Supposedly, Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up. On the other hand, Mark Twain wrote while lying in bed. Could standing up while you write give you extra energy? Could writing in bed help to relax your mind so that ideas flow more easily? Today, try doing one or the other and see if the physical change makes a difference in your writing...”
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