The Soup
Reflecting on the past 10 years I’ve spent in choirs can lead to unearthing many stories. One of those many stories is the tale of my 7th grade Boychoir trip to the coast. This was a trip of legendary proportions with copious amounts of middle school hijinks.
Let’s flashback to the magical year of 2015. It was the summer after 7th grade; I was listening to Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz on my 2013 iPod Touch and in a van full of middle school boys headed to Portland. The trip to Portland proved to be fairly uneventful until we got back to the hotel room that night.
One of my three roommates for the night decided to make some “tasteful” prank calls to various unsuspecting businesses. The first of many was your average prank call to a local appliance repair service that went something like this.
“Is your refrigerator running?” snickered the preteen.
“No.” sighed the fed-up employee.
“Then you better go catch it!” said the tween.
Not long after the disgruntled employee hung up; my roommate called another business. This time the target of the prank call was the local Verizon store. My roommate continued to bombard the employee about how much he hated Verizon’s service and how T-Mobile is superior.
The next day we hopped on the van and drove to the coast, cannon beach to be specific. After hopping off the van we got to the massive vacation house that we were staying at. The house consisted of around 2 massive floors and a huge basement. I ended up sleeping on the floor in the basement next to the TV. My friends and I decided that it would be a good idea to set up the huge surround sound speakers in the basement to watch TV. The first show we decided to watch was Extreme Couponing on TLC; a show that boasts a 4.8/10 on IMDB.
The premise of Extreme Couponing is about the lives of people who are addicted to using coupons when buying groceries. One guy on the show actually used so many coupons that he spent a negative amount of money and forced the grocery store to pay him the remainder.
We wasted the hours away watching that show until it was time for dinner. Around 5:30 PM we headed off to dinner at a local fish and chips place. One member of the choir went off to the bathroom and came back with the handle that he had stolen off of the bathroom stall door. The choir kid (let’s call him Stu) hid the handle in his pocket without showing it to anyone.
After lunch, we went to go see a community theatre production of Little Shop of Horrors. I have always been a big fan of musical theatre, and I enjoy that show quite a bit. The specific production that we watched had very robotic acting, offkey singing, and a lone piano to accompany the actors. All of these elements only added to the campy charm of the story.
After the show, we headed back to the house and settled in the basement to play some Super Smash Bros and talk about which Studio Ghibli is the best (Castle in the Sky is the right answer). After about 20 minutes of this, we started to wonder where Stu was. We knocked on the bathroom door and found Stu violently ill and vomiting. Out of fear that we might get sick as well, we made a charming name for the sickness Stu was facing. We all decided that Stu had been stricken with an acute case of The Soup.
We came up with the name “Soup” because the symptoms included vomiting. It was believed to have originated from the bad clam chowder that Stu had for lunch, but the keenest of us decided that it was from the stolen bathroom stall handle.
Overnight most of the choir had been infected with the wretched stomach bug. I gathered up the few of us remaining who hadn’t been tainted with The Soup. The survivors had kept our distance from the infected, whom we put into specific quarantined rooms. As survivors of the plague, we found pride in our sense of cleanliness and our preventive hand washing. I was sent by the leader of our squadron had sent me on an apparent suicide mission to grab the Wii U from the quarantine room so we could play videogames. I agreed to go on the mission for the greater good of the survivor community. I put on my hoodie and headed into the infected zone. The shells of my former compatriots stumbled around the vomit caked room. I found the video game console in the corner and pounced past the infected but was unfortunately touched on the shoulder by Stu and I knew my healthy days were over.
Around dinner, I was stricken with The Soup and spent around 15 minutes vomiting in the bathroom. At this time of the evening, the number of people without the infection had gone from 6 to 2 and we had all accepted our fate. We had accepted that we would all have to inhabit this house that reeked of vomit and Cheetos for only one more night. Soon this nightmare would be over.
The next day The Soup had dissipated and most of us had been cured. My friend Nathan who had previously found pride in himself being Soup-free had become stricken with the stomach plague. On the way back while we were bickering about Version vs T-Mobile; one kid was holding an empty Redvines bucket in case anyone threw up. Nathan was sitting next to the kid with the bucket and decided to play a prank on him. Nathan leaned over the bucket, pretended to vomit, and freaked out everyone in the van. The smirk on Nathan’s face is a look I may never forget and The Soup is a memory that will forever haunt me.