Breaking B(re)ad

Thanks to Netflix, I occasionally dabble in the Dynamic! Exciting! and over-priced world of cable television--and all for just $8 a month (take that, Time Warner!).  One Saturday afternoon last winter, when my get up and go had gotten up and gone, I logged onto Netflix to find out what all the fuss was over the series "Breaking Bad."

I made it through a couple of episodes before calling "uncle."

I'm sure it's just me--naive, unhip, bright-side-of-life me--but all of those blood-soaked wood floors, the acrid, science-gone-wrong creations, the heaps of meth-laced Benjamins left me feeling icky and hollow.  I mean, the guy's a teacher, for Pete's sake!

At the very least, it seems only right that I'd object on professional grounds.  Surely, there's enough mediocrity out there to sully my profession's reputation, without throwing in all that Sudafed, lye and violence.

That's why I'm feverishly working on the script for a new teacher-based television series, tentatively called "Breaking B(re)ad: A Staff Lounge Gone All Happy and Share-y."  Yeah, I know.  It's Family Channel or bust for this one.

But it does speak truth, at least for me.  Because, when I'm at work, the one place that continually feeds both my body and my soul is the staff lounge, an under-decorated room filled with leftover chairs and wobbly-legged tables that, each noon hour, also fills with people who are looking for a break from both their fast and their fast-lane lives as educators.

Granted, it is a noisy place.  But, if we are lucky (and, at East, we are lucky), the root of that noise isn't incessant complaining about teenaged clients gone wacko, but rather the giddiness that comes from getting together and doing something different for a half hour.  Much of my RDA of laughter comes from that room.  As does an impressive flow of interesting life stories and, on occasion, two grocery sacks of ripe, home-grown peaches there for the taking.

When someone new comes to East (and, this year, we've got about 25 new folks), I always put in a pitch for eating lunch in the lounge.  In a job filled with such high stakes, not to mention so many angst-filled, Axe-soaked teens, lunch in the lounge can act like a lifeline, a joyful reprieve from all the meth and violence of the larger world looming just outside our doors.