Bee Girl Returns

Go down and start the video if it isn't already playing.  Go ahead I'll wait.

I remember the first time I saw this video.  I cried.  This man absolutely got me.  I had no idea who he was but, he really understood this completely misunderstood person with no peer group.  I danced my dance for Lafayette, IN.  No one got it.  Everyone laughed.  I tried to change everything about myself and buy the clothes my mom liked.  I gained weight.  I went through college.  This song held power over me and gave me hope that one day I would find the group of bee people that understood my point of view.

I started my student teaching year and something horrid happened.  The nice man in the video that so completely understood me, died.  A stupid cocaine overdose.  I cried then, I cry now.  I learned everything about him then.

I was teaching at a high school here in Indiana when McCutcheon High School said that they were doing a spaces limited all area high school convocation to honor and educate about Shannon Hoon and his life.  I thought, "How nice."  We went from the high school where I was teaching and they told his story.  I learned that he had attended McCutcheon and that he was from Lafayette, Indiana. The teachers who had taught him in school told his story.  Everyone cried.

I moved away from Lafayette, but the power of the song never left me.  It moves me every time I hear it.  After a 10 year journey in other places, I moved back to Lafayette.  I am finding a place again in this town.

This morning I was driving out to get doughnuts for my family.  I was driving on Veterans Memorial Parkway on the south side and listening to my favorite Sirius XM station for 90's alternative, Lithium,  the song came on.  It hit me.  Here I was on a road that he only knew as 350 South, looking at buildings he never saw, crying because here I was again in this same town.

Only this time, the Bee Girl has found a home and place to truly be me.  But more on that next week.  Let's just say, I found a place where I truly fit in.