Two days ago, I received an email from a school colleague telling me that Friday’s Spirit Day Challenge was to “wear something that isn’t yours” and if willing to take the challenge, I should “wear a hand puppet all day to greet students.” You can imagine my “enthusiastic” support of this youthful esprit de corps.

I fired off an email to a good friend of a similarly experienced age with a cynical comment about the ease of finding a hand puppet among my treasures with 36 hours to spare. Right.

When I opened her response at 5:00 am and change this morning, I found her cheery message. “But this is SO easy,  you get your _________ finger puppet and wag it at everyone, with a “prize” for the person who can identify the author!” The blank spaces are mine, because she KNEW I had a finger puppet. She bought it for me.

So I did wear it in every class and wagged it at my kids and colleagues. I invited my students to win a $15 iTunes gift card if they could figure out who my girlie was.

They couldn’t, but they don’t know me well enough to be sure whom I really love. Maybe you do. Here are the clues I gave them, and here are their wrong guesses. Who DOES my little finger puppet represent?

Clue: She is a real person who is no longer alive, and the puppet was purchased in a museum.

Wrong guesses:

Laura Ingalls Wilder (in all her middle school spelling permutations, and I did talk about her in one of our lessons)

Louisa May Alcott (I was proud of this guess — apparently this student listens to me)

Margaret Thatcher (does she look like Meryl Streep in a cap?)

Harper Lee (I’m pretty sure Harper wasn’t wearing a mobcap in the 1940s)

Marie Antoinette (another student who must listen to me ramble about France)

Betsy Ross (not a bad guess)

Virginia Poe (lots of these; we studied Poe earlier this year and they were impressed by his child bride — there must have been a photo of her wearing a mobcap in the literature we read)

Annie Oakley (???)

Miss Muffet (a real person? Hmmm.)

Mary Todd Lincoln (I’m not sure where that came from)

Britney Spears (a real person who is “dead” that I sometimes talk about was the rationale — maybe she needed the mobcap while her hair grew back?)

Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde ( another big question mark)

Florence Nightingale (not bad; at least it’s in the right century)

Mary Washington (a museum, real person, dead, correct century)

Julia Child (that’s really funny)

And the BEST wrong answers were:

Emily Dickenson (2), Charlotte Bronte, and Emily Bronte.

Surely by now you have figured it out, so leave your answer in the comments below. I will have blown my entire prize budget by purchasing the runner-up cards for the four students who got close (a teacher needs to stand by her agreements), but you’ll receive my kudos for the entire week if YOU get it right. Thanks for playing Spirit Fish Friday!

As for wearing something that wasn’t mine, my choices were something of darling husband’s — a physical impossibility — and something of my mother’s — kind of eerie to go to school declaring that I am wearing a deceased person’s clothing. I was really glad I had the finger puppet so that I could play along. Thanks, Michele!