In high school, I took TV Production for four years straight. My third year in that class is when it began. As I recall, it was about halfway through the year. My teacher had let me read a screenplay of his that he had written. It was about an obituary writer for a local newspaper. The woman who wrote the horoscopes for the paper died, and the role was passed on to him, despite how much he didn’t want the position. The only thing was that he could not tell anyone he was the horoscope writer. It was supposed to be a secret.
That got my teacher, who I was very close with, and I thinking… what if our class had a horoscope writer? That is where I came in. I was the only one who had read the script in the class, I was the only one we told, no one knew. So, that night, I began writing daily horoscopes. I would bring them to class every day, and when the class went to go to work, I would slyly give him the horoscopes for the day and he would post them on the door. The first day I brought them to class, he decided that the horoscope writer needed a mysterious name like in his screenplay. We went with Madame R. Everyone in the class was so confused at first. At first they said it was just my teacher writing them. Then they started to point fingers at each other. Of course, since my teacher chose R as the letter, people pointed their fingers at me often, ESPECIALLY since I was close to the teacher, but I played it off well. Even to this day, I have not told a soul that I was the horoscope writer.
By the time senior year rolled around, I was the executive producer of my high school’s news show, UPC. Due to that and the amount of homework I had, it became increasingly difficult to write horoscopes, so I turned them into weekly horoscopes instead of daily. It was a lot more manageable. I also had that teacher both first and third period, so it was a lot easier to make sure he got the horoscopes as well. If for some reason I couldn’t get it to him first period, I would make sure it got done by third period. I would often try to get to class early (and with how fast I walk naturally, it was pretty easy to do so) and give it to him before anyone even got in the room. The horoscopes were now something his students looked forward to every week, and they genuinely enjoyed reading them.
Of course, by the end of senior year, a lot of people had already made up their minds that they thought I was Madame R. They were right, of course, but I never admitted to it. I denied it and let them think what they wanted, but I knew I had to stay strong. One kid even wrote a joke about me writing the horoscopes in my yearbook. I don’t think anyone continued the Madame R “tradition” after I graduated, but it’s a great time in high school that I will never forget.
~Madame R
