Oh, the German Dog

I've mentioned before that my best friend, Jocelyn, was a grade behind me in high school. While this made me sad in some ways (never getting to have high school classes with her, starting college without her, etc), sometimes it was kind of cool. Like when she started looking at colleges and went to all of my classes with me for a day to get a feel for the school I was going to.

I should back up very slightly. At the beginning of my senior year and Jocelyn's junior of high school, she was in a play called "The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940." If you want a good laugh, obtain a copy of this script. Or even better, find someplace that's producing it. It's absolutely hilarious. Such things occur as:
"There's been a murder! Call the police!"
"POLICE! POLICE!"
"On the phone!"
Anyway. Glazing over a lot of spoilers, Jocelyn played a character from Germany. 99.9% of her lines were in English, but at one point, she did start counting in German. And back to the A story, here.

So, Jocelyn goes to classes with me one day. We went to American Lit, which was completely uneventful and little dull. We had lunch, and then we went to German class. A lot of my German class was perpetually confused and could not wrap their minds around grammatical gender. While these college students were busy being confused, Jocelyn was sitting behind me, banging her head on the desk, wanting to scream. Finally, the professor gave up and told us to open our books to a particular page number. Behind me, Jocelyn gasped, and started furiously tapping my shoulder. "Roz! Roz! I understood that! I can count to five in German! Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier, Fünf! Why can I count to five in German?"
I just whispered "Helsa" in response, and then heard Jocelyn stifling laughter.

This is not the truly incredible story about Jocelyn's innate ability to speak German. That was simply the warm-up. The truly fantastic incident happened several weeks later.

Jocelyn was telling me a story about a friend of hers who had just auditioned for an opera company. I'm going to call this friend Michael, because they just said that name on TV. So, Michael was told that he would be expected to perform two pieces in different languages, to be determined on the spot by the panel. Michael tried to learn some German opera, but couldn't manage it, so he hedged his bets and learned several pieces in Italian and in French. He got to his audition and was first asked to perform an Italian piece. He was relieved. Italian was super easy for him. He sang beautifully and everybody on the panel was extremely happy with his performance. He felt really, really confident until the panel announced their next selection...it was German. Michael began muddled through the song, site reading where he could, but the letter combinations just didn't make sense. So he did what we all do when we don't know the words for a song we wish to sing. He made random nonsense sounds, hoping to just blend in to the music.

I'm going to switch to quoting Jocelyn here, because this is where it becomes amazing.

"So, Michael's panicking and just thinks 'Shit. What sounds German? Ach? Yeah.' And belts out "Ach!...Der...Deutsch...Hund!"

I starting laughing and said, "Yeah? He stood there and sang that?"

"Well, I don't know. I was making up words to take place of the words he was making up."

"You just made that up? Just now? You just spat out some random sounds?"

"Well, yeah. That's what Michael said he did. Why?"

"Because that was a sentence. You just pulled the phrase 'Oh, the German dog' out of your ass."

That was the day we decided Jocelyn's super power was an innate knowledge of German.