A Vazambam Exclusive: Incredibly Virtuoso Hellenic Rat Hurdles Another Language Barrier!
VazamBam
by VassilisZambaras
Meligalas Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—8/15/11—Believe it or not, this linguistically gifted, high-achiever of a mighty big mouse jumped from LOWER level to HIGHER—an ordeal usually requiring anywhere from 180 to 360 classroom teaching hours—after only 60 hours of intensive language instruction at one of the many RAT RACE SCHOOLS OF ENGLISH that have overrun the private language school sector in Greece—how did he perform that difficult task, you might ask. Elementary, my dears—He bamboozled his teachers by pretending English was not all Greek to him!
[Transcript of teacher instructing pupil] OK, Let’s try it again. C’mon buddy, there you go, eh, there you go, jump up again, C’mon!
NB: The few language schools that have remained loyal to cherished old teaching traditions are now using the following poem as a stopgap teaching aid and rallying cry to ward off any more assaults on their turf. Suffice to say, these language schools—including the Zambara School of English—admit only cats, or in case English is all Greek to you—γάτες!
“That’s All She Wrote, Folks!”
(A 5-Act Tragic Farce for Language Schools)
1.
The saucy mouse said tit,
The sassy rat said tat;
Seductive in the kitchen,
Lady de la Roquefort, sitting pat.
2.
The gnawing was ferocious,
The dame delicious, too;
Enamored with their gnawing,
They gnawed till they were bleu.
(A classic case of biting off
More than you can chew.)
No sign of consternation, no inkling of chagrin,
No reining in of hubris—O overweening sin!
(By Zeus! Such uninvited cheeky din
Was doomed to do our duo in.)
3.
His catnap abruptly truncated by the ruckus,
Our couch potato Tom exclaimed:
Sounds like hocus-pocus woke us!
With drat and drat and double-drat,
That’s quite enough of this and that,
He went gumshoeing to the kitchen.
4.
Zounds!
Brazen raiding scoundrels out-of-bounds
Ravishing our Lady Roquefort!
To arms! To arms!
5.
And with that, dear students,
His Tommy gun reverberated—
Ratta-tat-tat!
Cut the knaves down
To modest wedges,
Just like that.
Vassilis Zambaras
Vassilis Zambaras According to such reliable inside sources as The Weekly Hubris’s Publishing-Editor, VazamBam aka Vassilis Zambaras is all of the following, and more, in an order no one can vouchsafe as definitive: a publishing poet who writes every day of his life; a hugely successful father (and a not-so-very-successful local political candidate); a professor of English as a Foreign Language, with portfolio; a Renaissance Man of many skills, useful and not-so; a fount of information about his particular corner of his birth country; an unstable and utterly unique mix of Greek and American, American and Greek; and the man fortunate and wily enough to have made off with Messenia’s loveliest and most talented local daughter as his child bride. Besides being all the aforementioned, other more dubious sources have also reported seeing him hanging out at the corner of vazambam.blogspot.com—in the guise of a “new old kid on the blog, with an occasional old or new poem written off the old writer’s block.” Author Photo: Pericles Boutos
3 Comments
eboleman-herring
Vazambammer, I think you should ALWAYS include an audio version of you reading your poems with each posting. Had forgot how much I love your voice . . . even whilst addressing a mouse. :-) e
vassilis zambaras
Rats, Elizabeth! I’d almost forgotten I had one (a voice, that is). I’ll see what I can do but don’t turn bleu in the face as a result of waiting for the next soundbite.
eboleman-herring
I will turn bleh, or galazio, or loukaki, Pontikimou, if you do not rat-tle on for us!