The Nice Lady's Speech

The doors are still locked when the lady walks up.

PJ extricates himself from the cocoon that is his box office, walks to the side door, and lets her in.  She wants a ticket for The King’s Speech, a true story about King George’s stammering, and then she’s going to get lunch next door.

She’s concerned she might get sold out even though this has never happened on a Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday matinees are generally slow and relaxed. Mostly Senior Citizens.

“You know, “ PJ says. “It’s not necessary to get a ticket ahead of time. This is not going to sell out.”

“Well, I don’t want to miss it. You know when I was a child I also stuttered. In fact, I’ll tell you a story.”

And she did. A good one, too.

If it were a movie, the screen at this point would have gotten wavy as we viewers settled into our seats and traveled about fifty years into the past.

The story begins...

It was at St. Agnes’s High School in College Point in Sister Florentina Maria’s class.  We were taking turns and each of us had to read a paragraph out loud at our seats.  As my turn came closer, I could feel my heart pounding and I was out of breath.

Well, my turn came. I stuttered every word of the first sentence. It was awful.

Sister Florentina Maria interrupted.

She told the class that no one was to laugh. If anyone did, he or she would be required to come to the front of the room and spend the remainder of the class kneeling.

And I, she demanded, would continue reading the entire paragraph.

It took an eternity as I stuttered through each and every word.

When I finished, she said she would see me in her office at the end of class.

Now PJ, who spent 30 years in the classroom and never required his students to speak in front of the whole class in this manner because he remembered how uncomfortable it made him feel back when he was a kid, is thinking how cruel this was. And he wonders out loud to the nice lady if Sister Florentina Maria ever made it into heaven.

“Oh,” she said. "Let me continue please. So there I am sitting in front of her desk, frightened, and she says to me, ‘How long have you stuttered like this?’”

“Aw-aw-awl m-m-my en-en-en tire l-l-ife,” I replied.

“Well, Roberta,” she said to me. "You can’t go through life this way.”

And she made me join and participate in various activities. She had me learn to dance, to sing, to draw and to write poems.

She permitted, no, required me, to have an outlet for self-expression.

“OK,” PJ conceded, maybe she made it to purgatory.

“Oh,” the nice lady said. “Please let me continue.”

“Three years passed, and then one day I realized my stuttering had vanished.  It just disappeared,”  she said with eyes all a twinkle.

PJ sighed–smiled–and then thought, “Yup, wrong again.”

He knew Sister Florentina Maria was looking down at us with a twinkle in her eyes as well.

“I guess she made it into heaven after all,” PJ heard himself saying.

He handed the lady her ticket and asked her if could write about this in this week‘s column. The thought pleased her. And it pleased him.

And as she left for lunch, PJ thought about all the kids who stuttered and stammered when he was young. About all the pain they must have endured. And then he was reminded about how few kids suffer from this impediment these days. Yes, speech therapy is definitely one area that the public schools really get right.

And in her own way, fifty years back, Sister Florentina Maria got it right as well.