Although I am enjoying my retirement, I do often think about my former students and my life as a teacher because I loved that life. In trying to decide what stories to tell from my teaching days, I came upon a favorite formula: confess a scorching embarrassment, shape-shift something painful into something funny. So here goes:

One day, I took my octogenarian friend Kay to what I call the Green Cross store—one of those marijuana/CBD shops about which governors in red states lecture our governor. I took her to the one I go to regularly to get a tincture of CBD for nerve pain. It looks like a candy store in there with all the edibles but I only ever got the tincture. On the day I took Kay to the Green Cross store, there was a sale on fudge, which we both liked the sound of.

After we picked out a tincture for Kay, she announced, “I want to see the fudge.”

The counter guy plunked down a jar of a dozen pieces. Enough to send unsuspecting innocents to the emergency room. We hesitated over it. Counter guy said there were singles. I exhaled and we each bought one tiny piece of fudge.

A month went by. “Have you tried your fudge yet?”

“No, I’m afraid to.”

“Me, too. I think I’ll wait for a draggy day and then have a nibble.”

One night after only a few hours of sleep, I declared it a draggy day.

At 1:00 I was leading “A Zoom Variety Hour” for people with memory loss and their caregivers. It’d be nice to have a little boost. Green Cross counter guy said when his partner ingests the fudge, she cleans the entire house. My house could use a clean, too.

I bit off a pea-sized piece of fudge. An hour later, I had not started to clean the house. I bit off a cashew-sized piece.

At 12:30, I needed to set up for the Zoom. For the Variety Hour, I perched my computer on a music stand next to piano and trained the camera on the piano keys. I had my water bottle handy and my piano glasses on. I warmed up my voice, laid out my music and played through the songs.

For this particular Variety Hour I had dug out “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” per a request. It’s not a difficult piece but I only knew the last line and something about Brown’s Hotel. Before I ingested the fudge I had gone over the words and had played the accompaniment a few times.

So anyway, as I said, it was 12:30. I stood up and walked-sort of- to the bathroom to brush my teeth and put on my eyebrows. By the time I got there I was pitching around like a ship in a storm. I grabbed the sink and tried to concentrate on why I was there.

“Teeth,” I said aloud. “Eyebrows.” I looked at the clock. “Time. I think.”

I slowly moved the computer to the piano. Then I sat for the longest time trying to think what I was doing there. I couldn’t remember where I kept the address to the Zoom meeting. I lead the sessions but I don’t host them. When I finally found the address (where it had reliably been for eight months), I stared at it, thinking, “That’s not the right thing. That’s for the other thing. Where is the thing I need for this thing?”

Then the computer told me I had no internet. I banged the wifi icon over and over until it released its opinion that I did have internet. The modem looked fine. I looked at the clock. I had 5 minutes. I was sweating. In my sedation, I reset the modem and restarted the computer and sent a cryptic, apocalyptic text message to someone (I thought it was the person who hired me and payed me) to say I was having computer trouble, didn’t have the host’s phone number and couldn’t find the zoom address. Only it wasn’t nearly so coherent.

I got my internet access back and finally got clear that the thing that I needed was the thing that I thought I didn’t want and I clicked on the Zoom address. I was thrust into the Hollywood squares where every last person in every last box was grinning at me. Why were they grinning? Why were their faces so big? I heard the phrase “fearless leader.” They scared me.

I spit out an apology and an explanation that heavily favored blaming the computer. I said hello to everyone, one at a time, trying hard to be normal. Inside I was screaming, “Stop, just stop, the less you do, the better off you’ll be, sit still, SHUT UP.”

For the Variety Hour, I play and sing the welcome song (Zippa dee doo dah) and the goodbye song (Happy Trails) and a handful of standards, folk songs or show tunes that people have requested. Other people lead some songs so we get a nice variety of voices and instruments.

I was okay on “Zippa dee doo dah” because I don’t need the music. But when I had to play and sing “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” the notes swam on the page, the pages danced around and the keyboard moved back and forth so the keys weren’t where I needed them to be. My voice came from somewhere on the other side of the room.

The fudge had apparently made me thirsty and I regularly gulped water throughout the hour. I became paranoid that everyone thought I was drinking gin and that I was drunk. Through the entire hour, I waited for my own denouement when I would have to explain that I was stoned.

I shoved all my other songs to the end in the hope that we would run out of time, which we did. While each performer was singing, I tried to craft a non-crazy response to the song and the singer. This was usually something I did easily but it was an arduous task that day. Every time I opened my mouth to respond, my voice had moved around and came from a different part of the house, a neat trick that I didn’t appreciate.

Finally we were saying goodbye and they were grinning at me again with big faces and big teeth. When I finally got off the Zoom Variety Hour, I crept to the couch and lay in a stupor for a few minutes. Then I texted Kay and told her I had eaten a third of the fudge and was stoned and she should stand down until we could talk.

The next day I called two people who had been on the Hollywood Squares Zoom to ask if I had seemed off. Both of them said they hadn’t noticed that I was in any way different than usual. This was not comforting.