Devoted, obsessed, possessed call it what you will. The bottom line is that I was a Phan. That's right I was the model Phan, totally loyal almost to a frightening point. I lived phantom, I breathed phantom and somehow it still wasn't enough. I had every piece of memorabilia I could find, including a Susan Kay first edition. Yep I was hooked, funny thing was how I got hooked.
Ah, memories... seems like only yesterday I was sitting at the front of Mrs. Riley's eighth grade class willing time away while she read from a dog-eared copy of Phantom of the Opera monotonously. Boring... I rolled my eyes as she turned her page and cleared her throat to begin another paragraph. Before this year all I had seen about phantom was spoofs on local cartoon shows where a masked character would be playing an organ. Had I read the book by myself, I probably would have loved it.
No such luck. Now I was sitting with a packet of work half an inch thick to be completed as we read the book. Somehow that took all the fun out of it. I looked around the the class room Jessie and Ashley, my best friends, seemed to be as bored, if not more bored than me. Jessie had just completed her fifth paperclip necklace and Ashley was in the process of drawing a picture of Mrs. Riley being bit into two by a green dragon. On the other side of the room the other teacher yawned and seemed to be as bored as we were. I had to wonder if she were drawing any pictures like Ashley's
"Two teachers in the same room?" You say. Hold on let me explain. We were the subjects of a weird test program, guinea pigs you might say. The school district was doing an experiment on us, merging two classes together, purpose unknown. As far as we could tell the people in charge, whoever they are, must have gotten bored one day and out of hours discussion, and, it is rumored, more than one bottle of Jack Daniels, came this freak accident of a class. Never trusted the school district any way.
Finally the bell rang and we were free!... only to come back the next day to continue our torture. After a while we came to discover that the other teacher was a true Phan. She had brought posters and programs and a T-shirt to school in an effort to make us excited about the book. One thing I can say about that teacher she had a passion for her work and she liked to teach. She passed around a program and still I wasn't impressed. Then one day I walked into the class room to hear the end of Music of the Night emanating from her radio. Suddenly Phantom was all that I could think of. I asked my dad to buy me the forty dollar CD my teacher had played for our class. I attacked the Internet searching for sites only to discover there was a world of information out there. Funny. Had that teacher decided not to bring that CD to school I probably would have finished my worksheets and never looked back. I am forever in debt to her.