Chica?

Last week I auditioned for the campus spring musical, Beauty and the Beast. I'd done the musical last year at my high school and played the Wardrobe - you know, the opera diva with the Julia Childs voice that hangs out in Belle's room because she can't fit through the door? It was a lot of fun, but this time I auditioned for Mrs. Potts, and MADE IT!

So of course I was running up and down halls screaming like a maniac. Duh.

In celebration, the girls and I (a.k.a. Emily, Anne, Aliena and I) went out laser tagging. (Actually, we'd already planned to go like a week in advance, but we'll call it a celebration.) It was my first time, so Em and Anne had to explain how to play, where to shoot on someone to actually 'kill' them, et cetera. The place we went to was all Egyptian/desert themed, and each laser pack they had to pick from had a call name attached, and so of course I managed to find one marked 'Tigress' - in honor of my Taitie - and was feeling pretty confident about the whole thing.

Pretty confident, that is, until three minutes in to our twenty-minute battle, when I realized that a little girl, maybe ten, was following me around shooting me in the back every time my laser pack repowered.

Let's do the math here. If you get shot, your pack powers down for four seconds, and you can't shoot or BE shot in those four seconds. So if you DO get shot, that's your cue to book it away from whoever it is that shot you so it doesn't happen again. Which I did. But apparently this girl just had it out for me.

So after five or six times, I've had enough. Now, I pride myself on being good with kids. I used to play piano for my mom's children's choir, and they LOVED me. Once I had someone drive through the Donato's window where I was working and inform me that their four-year-old in the backseat thought I was pretty. I attract kids. I like kids. Mostly.

So I turn around, and in as nice a tone as I can manage - albeit loudly, since the music was pounding as loud as they could crank it - I said, "Chica, nothing personal, but you've gotta stop following me and shoot someone else, okay?"

She got that look that ten-year-olds get when there's no way in HELL they're going to do what you say. You know, the 'you're-not-the-boss-of-me' look. And then she screams, "I'm not a chica!"

(For those that DON'T know, 'chica' is just a Spanish word for 'girl'. I mean, really, there are worse things I could have called her. Come on.)

So for the rest of the session, she proceeds to follow me around and grabs one of her little friends, too, and even when I do manage to escape - I mean, my legs are friggin THREE TIMES AS LONG as hers - they inevitably find me.

Sigh.

We get scorecards at the end, and it will tell you (by call name) how many times you shot a person and how many times they shot you. Usually it's between three and six per person. I mean, it's a big arena, and there are a lot of people in there.

Well, Chica over there managed to shoot me sixteen times over the course of the battle, and her little Amiga got me nine times.

Friggin ankle biters.