Hoops Show Quotes

He checked out his surrounding. More books. A drinking fountain. A poster showing a guy slam-dunking a basketball with one hand and holding a book in the other, urging kids to READ! Weird, thought Steve. How can he even see the hoop? ... You see, Steven, Librarians are the most elite, best trained secret force in the United States of America. Probably in the world." "No way." "Yes way." "What about the FBI?" "Featherweights." "The CIA?" Mackintosh snorted. "Don't make me laugh. Those guys can't even dunk a basketball andd read a book at the same time.

Wild women are an unexplainable spark of life. They ooze freedom and seek awareness, they belong to nobody but themselves . . . she'll allow you into her chaos, but she'll also show you her magic.”—Nikki Rowe, Once a Girl, Now a Woman

We all know you’re a gifted athlete, August. Don’t just show off. Show us you can lead.

Life is a great big beautiful three-ring circus. There are those on the floor making their lives among the heads of lions and hoops of fire, and those in the stands, complacent and wowed, their mouths stuffed with popcorn. I know less now than ever about life, but I do know its size. Life is enormous. Much grander than what we’ve taken for ourselves, so far. When the show is over and the tent is packed, the elephants, lions and dancing poodles are caged and mounted on trucks to caravan to the next town. The clown’s makeup has worn, and his bright, red smile has been washed down a sink. All that is left is another performance, another tent and set of lights. We rest in the knowledge: the show must go on. Somewhere, behind our stage curtain, a still, small voice asks why we haven’t yet taken up juggling. My seminars were like this. Only, instead of flipping shiny, black bowling balls or roaring chainsaws through the air, I juggled concepts. The world is intrinsically tied together. All things march through time at different intervals but move ahead in one fashion or another. Though we may never understand it, we are all part of something much larger than ourselves—something anchoring us to the spot we have mentally chosen. We sniff out the rules, through spiritual quests and the sciences. And with every new discovery, we grow more confused. Our inability to connect what seems illogical to unite and to defy logic in our understanding keeps us from enlightenment. The artists and insane tiptoe around such insights, but lack the compassion to hand-feed these concepts to a blind world. The interconnectedness of all things is not simply a pet phrase. It is a big “T” truth that the wise spend their lives attempting to grasp.

All I’ve ever done is follow the rules and yet, somehow, it still isn’t enough. There’ll always be new hoops to jump through, like I’m in a dog show that I didn’t sign up for.

Uh-oh," Will muttered. "This is going to be ... interesting." It turned out the creative genius behind the movie was Will's dad - the god Apollo, which meant this was not going to be a typical orientation flick. No, as we soon found out, Apollo had written, directed, produced, hosted and starred in ... a variety show. For those of you who don't know what a variety show is, imagine a talent show on steroids, complete with canned laughter, pre-recorded applause, and an extra-large helping of hokeyness. For the next hour, we cringe-watched as Apollo and our demigod predecessors performed in song-and-dance numbers, recited poetry, acted in comedy sketches and harmonized in a musical group called the Lyre Choir. Naturally, Apollo featured prominently in most of the acts. The one of him hula-hooping shirtless while satyrs capered around with long rainbow ribbons on sticks ... you can't unsee that kind of thing.

I had longed for love, whatever that means, all my life. I longed for another human being to see me, accept me—care for me. But when I was a young man, I was so invested in this fake person I wanted to be, this false self. I simply wasn’t capable of engaging in a relationship with another human being—I never let anyone get close enough. I was always acting, and any affection I received felt curiously unsatisfying. It was for a performance, not for me. These are the mad hoops damaged people jump through: so desperate to receive love—but when it is given to us, it can’t be felt. This is because we don’t need love for an artificial creation, a mask. What we need, what we desperately long for, is love for the only thing we will never show anyone: the ugly, scared kid inside.

One day we are looking at the Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren at the Christian Dior show in Paris in 1968 and thinking yes, it could be me, I could wear that dress, I was in Paris that year; a blink of the eye later we are in one or another doctor's office being told what has already gone wrong, why we will never again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, never again wear the gold hoop earrings, the enameled beads, never now wear the dress Sophia Loren is wearing.

These are the mad hoops damaged people jump through: so desperate to receive love—but when it is given to us, it can’t be felt. This is because we don’t need love for an artificial creation, a mask. What we need, what we desperately long for, is love for the only thing we will never show anyone: the ugly, scared kid inside.

Georgeta paused by the door and turned around to look at the boys. “Keep in mind there are humans around. Don’t show off with your physical strength, like you did last time.” “It was an accident—” Erik tried to protest. “An accident? You bent the basketball hoop with one hand.” “Erm.” Erik sheepishly looked at Bogdan for reassurance, but Bogdan didn’t comment, just chuckled.

She made one mistake,” he kept repeating. “She forgot to change her earrings. She has the same earrings on.” The prosecutor was so dramatic. The scene was straight out of the movies. You could tell he had been watching the late show. Both the woman in the bank and i had on hoop earrings. When Stanley summed up, he just said, “Will all the women in the courtroom who have on hoop earrings, please stand up?” Half the women rose to their feet.

He put on his underwear and shuffled back to the bedroom, standing in the doorway for a moment and looking at the woman who had brought him home last night. Arms and legs splayed, everything show ing. Last night she had looked like the goddess of the Western world in her thigh-high leather skirt and cork sandals, her cropped top and hoop earrings. This morning he saw the sagging white dough of a growing boozegut, and the second chin starting to appear under the first.

Blame this dress,” I tell her. “It shows off the sexiest parts of you.” “Let me guess.” Her laugh rumbles into me. “The ass?” I caress the dramatic curve from her back to her butt, rubbing my hand along her spine. “No, this is the sexiest thing about you.” The laughter leaves my voice. “This gorgeous backbone.” She pulls back to study my face in the shadows. With the sun setting, soon we’ll have to pick each other out of the dark like we did the first time we made love. “Your strength,” I continue, pressing my fingers along the delicate bones strung up her back. “And this.” I skim the curve of her breasts, but don’t stop there, not until I reach the skin left bare by the neckline of her dress. Until my hand rests on her heart. “This heart of yours.” My laugh is full of self-deprecation. “That you somehow miraculously have given to me, it’s the other sexiest thing about you.” She traces the line of my eyebrows, the slant of my cheekbones, my lips. I know what she sees. A good-looking guy with a not-always-good heart. Not a heart like hers. “That’s just about the most perfect thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she says.

I was at first unwilling to show my teacher my own work, but after I summoned the courage he was generous in his praise and astute in his criticism. Thus I learned a number of the professional artist's tricks: clever matters of line and shadow. He also spoke freely of the new styles of painting, the abandonment of high wigs and whalebone for flowing costumes, and that most excellent word, Truth. "Portraiture should not be confused with flattery," he said. "What is more ridiculous than a stout duchess tricked out in hoops, masquerading as a goddess? Use your excellent eye to record what you see, Mrs. Croxon. Painting is eighty parts looking to twenty parts moving one's brush.

I griped about it at lunch one day to Bill Weist and Dr. Leslie Squier, our visiting psychologists from Reed College. I'd been trying to train one otter to stand on a box, I told them. No problem getting the behavior; as soon as I put the box in the enclosure, the otter rushed over and climbed on top of it. She quickly understood that getting on the box earned her a bite of fish, But. As soon as she got the picture, she began testing the parameters. 'Would you like me lying down on the box? What if I just put three feet on the box? Suppose I hang upside down from the edge of the box? Suppose I stand on it and look under it at the same time? How about if I put my front paws on it and bark?' For twenty minutes she offered me everything imaginable except just getting on the box and standing there. It was infuriating, and strangely exhausting. The otter would eat her fish and then run back to the box and present some new, fantastic variation and look at me expectantly (spitefully, even, I thought) while I struggled once more to decide if what she was doing fit my criteria or not. My psychologist friends flatly refused to believe me; no animal acts like that. If you reinforce a response, you strengthen the chance that the animal will repeat what it was doing when it was reinforced; you don't precipitate some kind of guessing game. So I showed them. We all went down to the otter tank, and I took the other otter and attempted to get it to swim through a small hoop. I put the hoop in the water. The otter swam through it, twice. I reinforced it. Fine. The psychologists nodded. Then the otter did the following, looking up for a reward each time: swam through the hoop and stopped, leaving its tail on the other side. Swam through and caught the hoop with a back foot in passing, and carried it away. Lay in the hoop. Bit the hoop Backed through the hoop. 'See?' I said. 'Otters are natural experimenters.

Mithras is a Persian light and warrior god adopted by the Roman army as their tutelary deity.  His name means “Friend”.  Mithras was the emissary of Ahura Mazda, the supreme power of good, who battled Ahriman, the supreme evil.  Mithras slew the divine bull to release its life-giving blood into the earth, and creatures that served Ahriman like scorpions and serpents tried to stop this happening. Mithras was often depicted with a pointed cap, and a number of reliefs show him in the act of slaying the bull.  As a solar god he was directly equated to Sol Invictus by the Romans, as can be seen from inscriptions.[469]  Twelve inscriptions to him have been found to date.[470] There were seven grades in the Mithraic mysteries, which were only open to free men.  The Mithraic cult was highly tolerant of other deities, as is evidences by depictions of other gods in the shrines.  Also as the soldier god, priesthoods were known to bring their statues to the Mithraea (temples) for protection when danger threatened. The Mithraea were usually small, and have preserved their mysteries to an extent as little writing remains from them.  A relief from Housesteads (Northumberland) shows Mithras bearing a sword and spear rising from an egg, surrounded by a hoop depicting the signs of the zodiac.  A silver amulet found at St Albans similarly depicts Mithras rising from a pile of stones.  More commonly images on altars showed him sacrificing a bull, such as at Rudchester (Northumberland), Carrawburgh (Northumberland) and the London Mithraeum.  There are now five known Mithraea in Britain, those at Caernarvon, Carrawburgh, Housesteads, London and Rudchester.  Of these all were purely military apart from the London Mithraea. 

About four months into it, we were shooting hoops in my dad’s driveway when Chip stopped in his tracks, held me in his arms, looked into my eyes under the starry sky, and said, “I love you.” And I looked at him and said, “Thank you.” “Thank you?” Chip said. I know I should have said, “I love you too,” but this whole thing had been such a whirlwind, and I was just trying to process it all. No guy had ever told me he loved me before, and here Chip was saying it after what seemed like such a short period of time. Chip got angry. He grabbed his basketball from under my arm and went storming off with it like a four-year-old. I really thought, What in the world is with this girl? I just told her I loved her, and that’s all she can say? It’s not like I just went around saying that to people all the time. So saying it was a big deal for me too. But now I was stomping down the driveway going, Okay, that’s it. Am I dating an emotionless cyborg or something? I’m going home. Chip took off in his big, white Chevy truck with the Z71 stickers on the side, even squealing his tires a bit as he drove off, and it really sank in what a big deal that must have been for him. I felt bad--so bad that I actually got up the courage to call him later that night. I explained myself, and he said he understood, and by the end of the phone call we were right back to being ourselves. Two weeks later, when Chip said, “I love you” again, I responded, “I love you too.” There was no hesitation. I knew I loved him, and I knew it was okay to say so. I’m not sure why I ever gave him a second chance when he showed up ninety minutes late for our first date or why I gave him another second chance when he didn’t call me for two months after that. And I’m not sure why he gave me a second chance after I blew that romantic moment in the driveway. But I’m very glad I did, and I’m very glad he did too--because sometimes second chances lead to great things. All of my doubts, all of the things I thought I wanted out of a relationship, and many of the things I thought I wanted out of life itself turned out to be just plain wrong. Instead? That voice from our first date turned out to be the thing that was absolutely right.

It was that he thought she was funny. God, every time she made him laugh, she felt like a god, like she’d wrought some miracle. He was happy. Happy to be with her. She’d never made anyone happy in her entire life. She was a definite smartass, so she’d had occasion to make people laugh. But it was different with Stellan. It moved her completely that she could give that to him. It was … she couldn’t describe it even in her head. It just meant everything that she could make Stellan happy. The rest, regardless of how much of it there was, and there was a lot, was frosting. Not the sex. Sex with Stellan was definitely moist, rich, delicious cake. But the rest felt like she was on a game show, and she’d jumped through all the hoops to win the million-dollar prize, and then the confetti dropped and the band played and she’d been told she’d also won the fabulous all-expenses-paid vacation to Italy, the new car and the yacht. Seriously, he looked like he looked, dressed like he dressed, fucked like he fucked … and the man could cook and he liked to cook, but mostly, he liked to cook for her.

It’s not our home crowd, but everyone cheers as I’m hoisted on the stretcher and taken toward the locker room. Every face I pass shows sympathy, even the Stingers’ players. When I pass Caleb, though, a black satisfaction darkens his blue eyes. There’s retribution in the curl of his lip. The defending player is supposed to give the player with the ball room to land. Caleb didn’t do that. It was a dirty play. No reasonably informed person watching what just happened would say otherwise. His scorn and cruelty cover me under the blinding lights and flashing cameras, and I wonder if Iris is still here. If she saw the play. Caleb did this to warn me, but I hope Iris takes it as a warning, too.

He wore a black tank, which showed off his slender tattooed arms and a pair of skintight leather pants with boots that buckled up to his knees. His shaggy black hair nearly fell over his eyes, but I could see he had a nose ring and tiny silver hoops lining at least one ear. He held an unlit cigarette between full lips. Fuck.

February 16: Marilyn flies to Seoul, South Korea, to begin entertaining the troops at ten different sites. Her outfit for her performances includes a skin-tight, low-cut, plum-colored crepe cocktail dress, with bugle beads and thin spaghetti straps, and high heeled sandals, with a matching long-sleeved bolero jacket she only wears when not on stage. Other than hoop earrings and a diamond brooch and bracelet, she wears no jewelry. Between performances, she covers over two hundred miles, wearing a flight jacket and combat boots. Neither snow nor sub-zero temperatures seem to impede her enthusiastic shows.

Fine, then just tell me what I need to do. It’s your specialty, right? Turning a diamond in the rough into a polished gem.” She regarded him skeptically. “Assuming there’s a precious stone under that exterior.” “Ha. You know it, sugar pie.” “New rule,” she said. “Don’t go around calling women names like sugar pie.” “If I called men names like that, people would think I’m queer.” “And don’t say queer.” “Everybody says queer. It’s even in the name of that show.” “It’s a matter of context. And judgment. Just do yourself a favor and don’t use that word.” “What should I use? Ho-mo-sexual?” He separated the word into obnoxious-sounding syllables. “How about you avoid the subject altogether? People can go for long periods of time without debating sexual orientation.” She assessed him with her eyes. “Unless this is a preoccupation of yours.” He snorted. “Right. You slay me, lady. You really do. First, you rag on me for being a Lothario. Which, by the way, I looked up. I’m nothing like that guy. He was banging anything in hoop skirts. And I’m not. I don’t have that problem. At the moment, my biggest problem is you. And you’re supposed to be helping me.” “I am, but I need some cooperation from you.” “You got it,” he said, polishing off the doughnut. “Sugar pie.

While I was doing my fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry, my family and I lived in Hawaii. When my son was seven years old, I took him to a marine life educational and entertainment park for the day. We went to the killer whale show, the dolphin show, and finally the penguin show. The penguin’s name was Fat Freddie. He did amazing things: He jumped off a twenty-foot diving board; he bowled with his nose; he counted with his flippers; he even jumped through a hoop of fire. I had my arm around my son, enjoying the show, when the trainer asked Freddie to get something. Freddie went and got it, and he brought it right back. I thought, “Whoa, I ask this kid to get something for me, and he wants to have a discussion with me for twenty minutes, and then he doesn’t want to do it!” I knew my son was smarter than this penguin. I went up to the trainer afterward and asked, “How did you get Freddie to do all these really neat things?” The trainer looked at my son, and then she looked at me and said, “Unlike parents, whenever Freddie does anything like what I want him to do, I notice him! I give him a hug, and I give him a fish.” The light went on in my head. Whenever my son did what I wanted him to do, I paid little attention to him, because I was a busy guy, like my own father. However, when he didn’t do what I wanted him to do, I gave him a lot of attention because I didn’t want to raise a bad kid! I was inadvertently teaching him to be a little monster in order to get my attention. Since that day, I have tried hard to notice my son’s good acts and fair attempts (although I don’t toss him a fish, since he doesn’t care for them) and to downplay his mistakes. We’re both better people for it. I collect penguins as a way to remind myself to notice the good things about the people in my life a lot more than the bad things. This has been so helpful for me as well as for many of my patients. It is often necessary to have something that reminds us of this prescription. It’s not natural for most of us to notice what we like about our life or what we like about others, especially if we unconsciously use turmoil to stimulate our prefrontal cortex. Focusing on the negative aspects of others or of your own life makes you more vulnerable to depression and can damage your relationships.

the Covenstead at the center of the town . . . no, the Saints called it a Meeting House. The center was a big hall lit by clerestory windows around the edge where the bright light of dawn showed. One half was full of pews, the second—oddly—equipped with basketball hoops and a recessed

It worries me I may tell you. I sit at home every night thinking about it and smoking endless cigarettes. If you call at my place any night after seven I will show you one of them. Quite circular. Like a hoop.

Son unas cualquieras,” she mutters. Nobodies. No culture, no family life, illiterates, she means. The kind of people who make her cross to the other side of the street if she meets them in the dark on payday. They’re her worst nightmare of what a Latin girl can become in the United States. Their big hoop earrings and plucked eyebrows, their dark lips painted like those stars in the old black-and-white movies, their tight T-shirts that show too much curve and invite boys’ touches.

She stepped back into the house. “I want to show you something.” Trying to get his legs back, his head wobbly, and his internal referee still giving him the eight count, Myron followed her silently up the stairway. She led him down a darkened corridor lined with modern lithographs. She stopped, opened a door, and flipped on the lights. The room was teenage-cluttered, as if someone had put all the belongings in the center of the room and dropped a hand grenade on them. The posters on the walls—Michael Jordan, Keith Van Horn, Greg Downing, Austin Powers, the words YEAH, BABY! across his middle in pink tie-dye lettering—had been hung askew, all tattered corners and missing pushpins. There was a Nerf basketball hoop on the closet door. There was a computer on the desk and a baseball cap dangling from a desk lamp. The corkboard had a mix of family snapshots and construction-paper crayons signed by Jeremy’s sister, all held up by oversized pushpins. There were footballs and autographed baseballs and cheap trophies and a couple of blue ribbons and three basketballs, one with no air in it. There were stacks of computer-game CD-ROMs and a Game Boy on the unmade bed and a surprising amount of books, several opened and facedown. Clothes littered the floor like war wounded; the drawers were half open, shirts and underwear hanging out like they’d been shot mid-escape. The room had the slight, oddly comforting smell of kids’ socks.

we read a little farther in James, we find that the tongue cannot be tamed (James 3:7 – 8). Every creature, reptile, bird, or animal can be tamed, but not the tongue. Imagine a colossal circus full of every kind of creature: dancing bears, prancing horses — even a ferocious looking feline or two performing tricks or jumping through hoops when their trainers give the signal. But way off in one corner stands a booth with a closed curtain and a sign that reads: “The Utterly Untamable.” Then, at a very strategic time during the spectacular show the ringmaster hushes the audience in order to display this beast that will not bend. When he throws open the concealing curtain, sitting behind it is a woman

Imagine a friend had an extra ticket to an amazing sold-out concert you’ve been dying to see. Wouldn’t you drop everything and jump through whatever hoops necessary to make it to that show? Sure, you might still have that annoying day job, or your kid might have the flu, but if you want to go see this concert badly enough, you will find a way. The same is true for writing. If you want it badly enough, you will make it happen.

Wild women are an unexplainable spark of life. They ooze freedom and seek awareness, they belong to nobody but themselves . . . she'll allow you into her chaos, but she'll also show you her magic.

You talk that way about the mother of your child?” I tsk and shake my head like it’s a shame. “I was gonna ease up on you, show some mercy, but now I’m gonna wipe the floor with your bitch ass.

I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law. For all we know, the world from the next moment on might be something like the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where the balls are hedgehogs which walk off, the hoops are soldiers who march to other parts of the field, and the rules of the game are made from instant to instant by the arbitrary decree of the Queen. It is to a world like this that the scientist must conform in totalitarian countries, no matter whether they be those of the right or of the left. The Marxist Queen is very arbitrary indeed, and the fascist Queen is a good match for her. What I say about the need for faith in science is equally true for a purely causative world and for one in which probability rules. No amount of purely objective and disconnected observation can show that probability is a valid notion. To put the same statement in other language, the laws of induction in logic cannot be established inductively. Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith. It is in this connection that I must say that Einstein's dictum concerning the directness of God is itself a statement of faith. Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith. A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthily growing science imposes upon it.

Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. But there was little interest in or awareness of the ministry, the military, the academy, government service or the zillion other sectors. Furthermore, few students showed any interest in working for a company that actually makes products. . . . [C]ommunity service has become a patch for morality. Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies, so they just talk about community service. . . . In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. . . . Furthermore . . . [a]round what ultimate purpose should your life revolve? Are you capable of heroic self-sacrifice or is life just a series of achievement hoops? . . . You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job. 110

Because Nettles was on parole for a felony conviction, Ballard did not need to jump through most of the constitutional hoops that protected citizens from unlawful search and seizure. By legal definition, being on parole from prison meant Nettles was still in the custody of the state. By accepting parole he had given up his protections. His parole agent was allowed to access his home, vehicle, and workplace without so much as a nod from a judge.

It strikes me that it’s always religious people who are most surprised by grace. Those hoops we become so exhausted from jumping through? We created them. We forget that our maker made us human, and so it’s okay—maybe exactly right—to be human. We are ashamed of the design of the one we claim to worship. So we sweep up our mess and hide our doubts, contradictions, anger, and fear before showing ourselves to God, which is like putting on a fancy dress and makeup to prepare for an X-ray.

may be down a pair of rain boots, she thought, but I’m definitely up in friends. Dunwiddle Magic School was fifth through eighth grades. The students were divided into the five magic categories: Flares, Flyers, Flickers, Fluxers, and Fuzzies. Then there was group of unusual kids like Nory: the fifth-grade Upside-Down Magic kids. Those kids studied with Ms. Starr, the Upside-Down Magic teacher. Ms. Starr taught literature, social studies, gym, math, and science—and she also had special training to help kids with upside-down magic. She wanted them to get in touch with their unusual talents. They did headstands in class. They hula-hooped. They did interpretive dance (though none of them liked it). They did trust exercises. They tried to feel their emotions and channel their magical talents productively. Today, after math, Nory slid her protractor into her desk. Her friend Andres Padillo was floating on the ceiling, attached to a long leash connected to his belt, as usual. Andres was an Upside-Down Flyer. He’d flown up, up, up on the day his magic came in, and he had never flown down. That’s why he had to be on a leash. He couldn’t stop flying. Nory had an idea she’d been wanting to try. “Pull Andres down,” she told Elliott. “Hey, Andres! Let’s do a gravity experiment. I’m going to sit on you, okay?” Marigold Ramos came over. “We’re going to sit on Andres?” “I’m not sure about this,” muttered Andres as Elliott reeled him down. “You’ll be fine!” Nory said. “It’s for science!” To Marigold, she added in a whisper, “Don’t shrink him.” Marigold wasn’t an upside-down talent. Or at least, no one had ever been able to put a label on her magic. She shrank things, but she couldn’t make them big again afterward. Andres was now floating level with the desks. He grabbed on to the back of a chair with one hand and on to Elliott’s shirt with the other. Elliott struggled with the leash, trying to keep him low. Andres’s feet kept floating up. Nory hopped onto a chair. She pulled Marigold up with her. “I’ll sit on his shoulders. Marigold, you sit on his back. And, Andres, we’re going to try to weigh you down. But maybe you’ll fly us up, instead. Either way will be excellent, okay?” “You might hit your heads on the ceiling,” warned Andres. “Students!” Ms. Starr said, walking over. “What in the world is going on?” “An experiment, Ms. Starr,” said Andres. Nory and Marigold were sitting on him, but he hadn’t lowered down to the floor. He was just about two feet off the ground, with Elliott still holding the leash tightly. “Girls, there will be no riding of Andres.