Poor Kids

• Posted on March 3, 2009 at 12:26 am

When I was little, my best friend Erica and I used to pretend to be poor. We called it “Poor Kids.” I do not know who or why or when exactly we made this up, but we were in grade school when we played it. I don’t know why we got such a kick out of it, but this is how it went.

We were two orphans who’d been abandoned by their parents. If memory serves me right, Erica liked her name to be “Carrie” and I was something like “Linda.” We liked to really get into character and how could you do that if you used your real name? I think sometimes we were homeless on the streets and at other times we lived in an orphanage. So one day, us poor kids stumbled across a baby in the street. She may have been left in a dumpster or just under a pile of garbage. We would use our cabbage patch dolls as the baby or we just pretended if we didn’t have a doll handy (we played this at recess a lot so there were times we forgot to bring our dolls to school).

It just so happened that at the same time we found this cute baby, we saw a sign for a “Baby Contest.” How convenient! Whoever enters the cutest baby wins a ton of money, which in our 8 year old minds was probably $100. I’m a little fuzzy on how we got the baby cleaned up or got it clothes to wear for the contest. Did we prostitute ourselves for some quick cash? Sell some drugs? Surely not. Maybe one of the nuns running the orphanage helped us out. So we entered the baby (she was so precious) and now comes the time for them to announce the winner. Oh, Jesus…are we gonna win? Of course, because it ended the same way every time. The announcer would say, “And the winner is…The Poor Kids!” We were so happy that we had won. That was pretty much it. Then we would repeat it all over again.

Wow, this all sounds really fucked up now that I’ve written it down, but in our defense “Annie” was a very popular movie about orphans when we were growing up.

• 7 Comments on Poor Kids
• Filed under
  • Childhood Memories of the 80's