Napolean Dynamite is alive and well

at my high school.

Picture, if you will:

It's "rally" day; 1200 sweaty teenagers packed into a gym.

A slightly-pudgy kid with a dorky haircut, dressed all in black, with suspiciously-looking ballet-style black shoes walks out onto the stage floor. He's holding two sticks attached with a wire, on which he juggles a giant yoyo.

A giant yoyo.

There was silence in the gym. That kind of awestruck silence you hear in your dreams when you've shown up to work and forgot to put on pants first. Even the collective thrumming of four hundred not-so-surreptitiously worn iPods stops.

Then the hip hop kicks in, and the kid starts dancing. Couple steps here, point a toe there; it wasn't really dancing by any stretch of the imagination. So then he tosses it into the air -- does a friggin' somersault -- and catches it. Wild applause.

This continues with great success for four minutes. Afterwards, I asked my students what they got out of it, and they all talked about "that kid with a yoyo" with a kind of respect few people at the age of 15 ever give.

Oh yeah, in case you're wondering the rally was not a talent show, nor a pre-election show-down. It was a multicultural rally to culminate Black History Month celebrating the achievements of 8 phenomenal African-American athletes and also to show off their own talents. The guiding theme was a bit weak (somehow they also fit hula-dancers into a description of Karim Abdul-Jabar), but who really listens to a high school rally anyway?

p.s. Not that it matters, but the juggler was white.