Here is a Jim Tripp story if you need something for tomorrow. For those of you unfamilar with Jim’s story format, he likes to suggest optional target structures – so there is a simple version and then one with a few optional structures, the ones in brackets:
Bad Smells
[rooms of a house]
[levels of a house]
smells bad
goes up/down the stairs
It smells like …!
Come here!
Julia is at her new house. She goes directly to the kitchen. [The kitchen is on the main floor.] It smells really bad. Julia yells at her husband Robert, “Come here!” Robert yells back, “Why?!” Julia yells, “Because it smells like burned armpit hair in the kitchen!”
Robert goes directly to the bedroom. [The bedroom is on the second floor, so Robert goes up the stairs.] He enters the bedroom. It smells horrible. He yells at his wife Julia, “Julia, come here!” She yells, “Why?” He yells, “Because it smells like 103 dead rats in the bedroom!”
Robert and Julia both go to the bathroom. [It’s in the basement, so they both go down the stairs very carefully.] They enter the bathroom. It smells fantastic. Robert says, “This bathroom smells like white lilies. Julia says, “It doesn’t smell like white lilies, it smells like pink unicorns.”
Jim notes:
“I used this story with a class of adults, and it worked great because one of my students had recently moved to town and bought a new house.
“If you use this story with teenagers or younger, please use your actors to represent a fictional character or someone famous, so that the cleanliness of any students’ home is not put into question. Otherwise, this story might create the perfect opportunity for someone to offend your courageous student-actor.”