My grade 12 drama teacher was always doing screwy things. He'd easily spend the first 20 minutes of class just doing attendance. Man that guy could ramble. One time, he signed the whole class up to spend a week reading to the English as a Second Language class. Noble, sure, but we were never consulted and I still fail to see what this had to do with theatre. The most memorable time, however, was when he invited a class of German students visiting Canada to join in and watch our class.

For the first bit we all sat around in a circle on the stage, German students on one side, Calgarians on the other. We chatted for a bit and then Rachel from our class, a cheery sort of world do-gooder type, asked what kind of things they found in Canada that they didn't find in Germany. One of them spoke up and told us about how, in Canada, when driving from town to town there were miles and miles of nothing, where in Germany you couldn't drive more than 10 minutes without passing through another town. There was a pause as the others tried to think of other things. Then one of the German students spoke up.

"Frozen Jews," he said.

A hush fell over the entire room. Faces drooped from good humour to disbelief.

Rachel, almost immediately, spoke for all of us, "What?!? did you say?" Surely he didn't just say 'Frozen Jews'.

The Germans were obviously confused by our sudden change of mood. "You know," continued the student, now nervous, "Frozen Jews...In a can? You buy at the grocery store?"

The tension broke. Across the room we all fell into nervous, relieved smiles and titters of laughter. "Ohhhh!" said Rachel, "You mean frozen JUICE!

"Yeah. Frozen jews."

I remember thinking at that moment, I guess we know who the racist ones are in this room. A little accent mistake and we were all picturing this happy group of travelling students as Nazis, or worse yet, that such dastardly things were going on right in the open in Canada! The conversation was pained after this and finally our drama teacher decided that the class would put on an improvisation for the visiting students. Usually this was quite funny and enjoyable, except that day we were so off. It was terrible and all of us were embarassed to be up on the stage. We sucked more than the greatest incident of suckyhood in the history of suckiness. It was painful. Those Germans must have just thought we were the biggest idiots. When their fellow Germans in the homeland ask them about the differences between Canada and Germany, they won't say the roads and they won't say frozen jews. They'll say: 'Canadian Idiots.'