My freshman year of high school, our theology teacher made us undergo the obligatory 'carry an egg baby around with you 24/7 to instill a sense of procreative responsibility in your hormone-addled bad selves' project.

I have to think that doing this exercise with five-pound bags of sugar/flour would be more effective. It is not really that hard to lug around an egg, especially when its innards have been blown out through a pinhole.

I went overboard with mine, furnishing it with a lovely set of accessories (plastic food, toys, etc.), gluing pink and seafoam green falls of curly hair stolen from My Little Ponies to its head, and drawing it a face in a style that I now would categorize as 'French whore' (little beauty spot, overdone lips, and all). I named it Georgette after the spoiled poodle in Oliver and Company, and that probably had some bearing on how I decorated it.

Along with lugging this egg baby with us everywhere, we also drew lots to see how much education (no high school degree to Ph.D) we would get, then had to draw up a budget and plan for how we would live. Two of my friends got no high school degree and a Ph.D respectively, so the no high school degree one arranged to be the nanny of the other one, who then supported them both with her earnings. I drew a no high school degree as well, waited until the night before to do my project, and then devised a plan wherein I would make my living through telemarketing (dude, $500 a week!) until I had saved up enough money to go to college.

The point being that no one kept their egg babies with them all the time, not even at school. Several people hated their egg babies so much that after the project was over, they had a ritual 'smash the egg babies against a tree' ceremony on the grounds of our brother school. I might add that those girls are not among the ones who now circulate e-pictures of their offspring or their burgeoning pregnant bellies on our class listserv. Mainly because they haven't either.

Me, I kept that baby with me all the time, even propping the basket next to me as I slept. What can I say. I was younger than everyone in my class and I still harbored a secret love of dollies. This chicky is not the only one with fond memories of She-ra. I was actually on the cusp (and that is being generous) of being too old for She-ra action figures when they came out, and yet I still have almost a full set of them up in my parents' playroom. And I was anal enough that it irked me that the Angelica doll had long, flowing locks, when anyone who watched the cartoon knew that she should really have a Princess Di-esque bob. I almost chopped off my doll's hair many a time, for the sake of accuracy, but that old fear of committing an irreversible action always held me back.

So yes, I was a very good mommy to my egg baby.

And what does all this have to do with Easter? Well, we did this project in the spring, and Easter weekend my English class went on a field trip to see a play. Big surprise, I was the only one to bring my egg baby.

We didn't enter the theater until all of us had arrived, so I ended up scrambling over some older people to get to my seat. And as I was stepping over one older man's toes, I heard him exclaim loudly to his wife, "Look honey! That little girl brought her Easter basket!"