Pulling Your Leg

(I am in second grade. I am about to be one of the leads in our class Christmas program that night, and during the last hour of the school day, my teacher comes up to me.)

Teacher: “Good luck tonight! Break a leg!”

Me: *looks confused*

Teacher: “It is a traditional way to wish someone luck when they were about to act in a play.”

(She then sent me out to play on the playground before we went home. I promptly slipped on the concrete on the playground, fractured my ankle, was taken to the office by another teacher, and was taken to the doctor by my mom, all without my teacher knowing I had been injured. Twenty years later, my second grade teacher still recalled to my mom her moment of instant horror when I walked into the Christmas program on crutches with a cast on my leg. For that brief second, she had thought I had actually taken her command to break my leg seriously! In the rest of her teaching career, she told my mother she never said ‘break a leg’ to another student, just in case.)