Thursday May 30th is a "Free Dress" day at Paradigm because it's essentially the last day of the school-year. It's the day we all play sports or compete in games ranging from a 5K run, to Pokemon, chess, geek trivia, and an Essay writing contests. I am placed over Basketball with Steve Barfuss.
After playing several games of basketball I reek like a Hot-Shot firefighter. With my new fumed identity I only feel comfortable around my own sweaty kind. The school is holding the Paradigm Olympics today to burn up an otherwise worthless day. The school is fairly diverse, but basketball is going through a dark age. Volleyball is wildly popular. I wonder if it's because they get the air-conditioned gym while basketball is relegated outside on the blacktop with the most unforgiving rims since the Oak City Days Three on Three Tournament.
Basketball is fun, but ever since I woke up I've been thinking about the evening gig that Steve Barfuss and I will be playing. Maybe if I lived the golden rule better I wouldn't be going to the gig. David has a piano recital at the same time as the benefit concert. Honestly, I don't know which I knew about first, but it didn't matter because they didn't conflict until the benefit concert was rescheduled on the same night as David's performance. I'm not sure I want to pray over whether I should do one or the other for fear that I already know the answer. I try and internally tell myself that it's for a good cause, but it all sounds like an excuse. When I talk to Em about it I offer to take Jenna and Nancy so she only has to worry about Evan and Emeline.
"Who is going to watch the girls while you're playing."
I must really want to do this gig because I've already thought this through. "Steve said he'll bring his eight-year-old and she can hang-out with the girls during the performance."
It was true and I could see that Em was making sure I was committed to number one: baby-sitting and number two: performing.
After the Paradigm Olympics, Steve and I practice the sets we'll play and I leave out a verse of "I am a Man of Constant Sorrow" for brevity's sake. With our other favorite song, "Ain't no Grave", we are both treading less familiar waters--him on banjo and me on cello; I never get all of the words exactly right, but we like it so it is our planned finale. The songs in-between feel as much a part of us as "I Am a Child of God" to a Primary chorister. We jam together twice every week. We've got this.
After school I have several things to do before I can go home and pick up the girls. First on the list is signing a new contract for next year's salary. I've tried to get out of this with both Scott and Troy.
"Hey do I need to meet with you guys or can I just sign something?"
Both have told me they want to meet. This is literally the third time we've rescheduled. I honestly don't like these meetings and yet they aren't all bad. After the door is closed they just kind of watch. I feel like I'm the prey and they're the big game hunter on Jumanji chasing after Alan Perish, played by Robyn Williams. The last time I watched that movie I realized the hunter, Jonathan Hyde, plays both Alan's father and Van Pelt, the hunter. He's always getting after Alan for being the bed-wetting little boy who can't stand up for himself. Scott, Troy, and Chris watch me squirm in my chair. I wish there were somewhere to put my long arms.
My employers have been like Jekyll to me of late, but Hyde exists too. They are thorough so when in question they want you to give them your entire side of any issue. If they agree with you then you get Jekyll, but if not then Hyde. After the first semester of this year, in the middle of January, they called me in.
I had instituted democracy in my classes according to A.S. Neill's Summerhill School with myself as an equal voting member of the mob. It went south like Wallace's "Wrong Trousers". The students could vote on what they wanted, which they did. In my Newspaper class they gave themselves a daily snack-time. The World-sports class used their suffrage to institute a dunce-cap law. An arbitrary conviction and confirmation from a majority of the class could send a "violator" to the corner for five minutes with a dunce-cap. I'm sure the evening news would have loved to get hold of that. As it turned out, the Newspaper class elected a new president every month. It seemed like a good idea, but it created factions. Each faction following its own former class president. In the end the class was torn into at least six groups and each seemed to cry out, like so many of Cesar's bloody piercings, trying to name their own new tyrant. The World Sports class, mostly due to daily exercise in the gym, never really took the dunce-cap law too seriously. When the administration called me into "the office", last January, they thought that the problem was the gym. Ironically the newspaper class was the problem, but they weren't even using the gym.
"Steve" one of them said, "How did things go last semester...well, the reason we wanted to bring you in here was to let you know that we think it would be better if you didn't have the gym anymore."
I had just watched a TEd video that talked about how alphas, male or female, use power-poses to one-up the competition. I nonchalantly struck a subtle power-pose and tried to explain the gym was helping not hurting my classes. In the end I predicted the Spring semester wouldn't turn into Lord of the Flies.
Now, at the end of the Spring Semester, I sat in "the office" and we talked about the year. Of course "The Democracy" comes up. I can't believe what I was hearing.
"That was awesome to let your students experience complete democracy."
We talk about how at least three of the students in the Newspaper class have been suspended for drugs and others are raising Cain in various classes. I don't enjoy contract meetings, but I can't say it wasn't entertaining.
On the way home I go into Walmart to pick up some flowers so David can give them to his teacher at the recital. Before I grab the flowers I see that bananas are on sale for thirty-three cents a pound. I don't have a cart, I'm here for flowers, so I grab as many as fit in my arms. I know that I saved money not getting a cart, but as I'm hunched over trying to wedge the flowers into my banana pouch a young mother who might as well have been one of my sisters, pregnant, I think, asks,
"Do you need any help?"
"No, thank you". Is what I say, but I'm thinking, can't you see how competent I am? Are you questioning my abilities here, sister?
After Walmart and filling up the car at the Chevron I get a call from Em.
"Where are you at?"
"I'm at the Chevron and I'll be home in a few minutes."
"Were you able to get the flowers?"
"Yup"
"We'll need to meet somewhere so I can get those from you."
We meet at the roundabout and I exchange Jenna and Nancy for the flowers. Hardly a fair trade. We go home and I scrub the basketball sweat off. While I'm in the bathroom I can hear Nancy crying outside the door.
"We aren't going to get a treat. Why did we go with daddy?"
I can't just drop my gig at this point so I tell her that treats have been a part of the plan from the beginning.
"Why did you say we weren't going to get a treat?"
I'm having a hard time remembering, but I think I said something about that between the roundabout and home. I was hoping to under-sale and over-perform, but she forced my hand with this melt-down.
On the way to the concert we are delayed for twenty minutes in road construction. The directions I had for the school were spurious so instead of arriving twenty minutes early we are twenty minutes late for a sound check. I start to wonder if the fates are subverting this performance. I can't let that distract me, but when I walk into the auditorium I get really nervous. I'm feeling like Guy Patterson in That Thing You Do in the scene where he psyches himself out at his first spotlight performance and tips and crashes hi-hat to the floor. Is this cave of an auditorium my over-sized coffin?
To get here, Steve has been walking me through driving directions on the phone like an air-traffic-control tower bringing in a plane on a stormy night. Maybe I should have looked Copper Hills High up on Mapquest before I left? I ask him what song he wants to use for the sound-check. He wants to do our best song, "Constant Sorrow", but I want to save that card for the performance. I suggest "Home with the Girls in the Morning". He consents, but then when I vacillate to do "Constant Sorrow" he seems relieved. Steve wears a beard, long hair, plays lead guitar, and argues about theoretical books and ideas to the death, but he's really a laid-back guy.
A year ago I helped him remodel his Copperton house. Daily he reminded me of working with our artistic-music-loving-cousin Jethro Gillespie. Steve and I seemed to worry more about which Pandora Radio station we were tuned to than working on the house. We're both dilettantes, but he defers to me because I brag about growing up in a family that remodeled houses for a living. As a teacher I'm afraid I like to talk about the theory behind work more than working. However after tearing out flooring, walls, ceilings, load-bearing walls, and closets (complete with the previous owner's pornographic skeletons) we put theory away. We spent many nights, after work: framing new walls, adding a new archway, laying tile, hanging drywall, mudding and taping, and transitioning the old into new.
After we play through our warm-up I'm feeling better and worse. It's only when I both sing and chop the chords that the nervousness leaves. The violin is a relationship in continual progress and regress. I find when I play a new tune in public it goes wrong. A public jam is like a Nietzschean silver hammer destroying imperfections and exposing flaws. When I've played in church it seems to always go wrong because there isn't an informal public jam where "Joseph Smith's First Prayer" or "How Great Thou Art" fit. I usually look back on performing in church as a bad experience, because that's where I've killed a lot of songs that would have been resurrected with merely one or maybe seven more performances. Maybe I could take a schmaltzy version of an L.D.S. hymn to a jam, but even in Utah that isn't something that you get away with twice. I can hear it now, "What do you want us to play? We thought we were getting away from church at this bar!" Gospel songs are close enough to blues and folk tunes that some of the new-grass bands like Crooked Still have a heyday with "Wading Deep Waters", "Pharoah", and. "Calvary". The public performance does one thing the metronome-driven-private-
After our warm-up two high-school-aged-guitarists come over and engage us in dialogue. The one who plays chords like they were a Jimi Hendrix solo is appalled to hear we make up a new band-name every time we do a gig.
"You don't really care if you get recognition?"
Doesn't he know that Steve is old enough for a mid-life crisis? What's in a name? Tonight, when I was stopped in the traffic, Steve asked what I thought our band's name should be. I told him that we haven't had any harsh critics call our prospects a "Lead Zeppelin", as in a blimp made entirely of metal. The worst thing we've had said to our face is the student that tried to stop us in the middle of a tune two weeks ago and asked, "Why are you doing this?" I suggested we call ourselves "Wiggly Dander" after a line in a poem Steve wrote a few months ago with his students. The phrase was meant to refer to a head of disheveled hair, but it also might be mistaken for an innuendo so tonight Steve told the powers that be that "Southwind", a song we haven't played in months and doesn't seem to fit like "Wiggly Dander", is our name. Giving animals, homes, and children a new name always dumbfounds me. The children name the chickens: Dark Disorien, Cloudy, White, Skittles, Fawny, Olivia, Cheep, and Shy. We call our former homes after the city they're in or after the child that was born there. We called our first son, "The Baby" for a few days before we settled on David. Jenna was easy because Em always knew what she'd name her first baby girl. Nancy was easier than David, but it took a while. Emeline was Emmaline on the first-draft of her birth-certificate. Evan's name on all of his hospital documentation was "Baby Fife". Maybe having more of an obsession with a name would transform the nameless bands I've played into heroic legends, but maybe I'd start to believe it mattered more than knowing how to play?
Steve was given the cue for our performance, "You'll go after the second 'Slam Poet'". Originally we were supposed to play for a half-hour block, but another Steve, the student-adviser, who invited us to play, informs us tonight that a bunch of students signed up at the last minute. We are essentially performing at a high school talent-show. That takes the jitters out a little bit, but then the first Slam Poet takes the stage after some student performances and he is good. My hands clam up so I open them and rest them on my shirt-sleeves so the sweat can soak directly into the fabric. Jenna and Nancy have been doing well up to this point. Both girls are laughing at Slam Poet number one. Jenna comes up to me after a few more performances and tells me that Nancy pried a wad of chewing gum off of the seats and is chomping away like Violet Beauregarde. I don't know why, but STDs infecting her little body cloud my mind and I almost leap over to make her spit out the unspeakable filth. Nancy at first is shocked that I would deprive her of a hard-earned joy. After the shock wears off she buries her face in the folding seat and turns into a weepy ostrich. I go back to my seat and try to watch the concert. After she realizes I'm not going to go over to her she moans back and forth in the empty row in front of us. She crosses in front of us half a dozen times before she comes and sits on my lap and tells me how emotionally tied she was to the gum. After resolving this drama, the second Slam Poet leaves the stage and the "dead-air" is our responsibility. The MC announces us two or three times as a joke while we amble on stage. His joke feels more like annoyance with these two dads that have somehow made it onto the program. I'm sure he's wondering, "Did that one just come on stage with a four-year-old?"
Unpeeling the cello and unbuckling the violin add to the dead-air time. They say that seven seconds of dead-air will kill a radio show. We go on the stage. The audience is silent. Steve starts into "Constant Sorrow" and I wonder if anything will come out when I open my mouth. It does. I add the verse that I left out in practice which confuses Steven and we end without the final verse. Our second number is a set of two reels: Caribou and Catharsis. The first tune could have been written for a nature film on reindeer games. Tonight, the transition between the two reels feels smooth. Up to this point...no hiccups. Four measures into Catharsis Steve stumbles. Steve never stumbles like this. We've been playing together for almost two years so I recognize when he's lost and he knows when I miss a repeat. He is the glue that holds my wanderings in a straight course, but he isn't lost. Something is wrong. To me, it sounded like he'd lost a pick. It's confirmed when I hear his fingernails barely able to eek out half of the sound the lost pick commanded. We stop. Steve inverts his guitar and starts shaking it like a baby trying to get the rice out of its rattle. I announce: "Lost a pick in the guitar". The young guitarist, the same one who worried about our name changes sprints at the stage holding up a pick like he is Prometheus with his stolen torch from the gods determined to light the Olympic Flame. Steve's light is rekindled from Prometheus and we finish our Catharsis.
The only other thing worthy of note in this performance is our encounter with our two new instruments. In some ways I feel like an impostor playing the cello. Steve isn't on his principal instrument either when he dawns the banjo, but we love "Ain't no Grave" enough to risk posing. When I started grooving on the cello the banjo doesn't mesh, at first, so I keep playing the intro. I play at least ten measures of intro and it still doesn't jive. Then I stopped and confessed to the audience,
"This is the first time I've played the cello in public."
We start again but now the lyrics don't come. The silver hammer rains its blows on my brain. Finally, I started into the lyrics and we bounce our way through. The song feels dead as I ironically shout out, "Ain't no grave" not even the one that I've willingly climbed into as I speak "gonna hold this body down."
During the performance Nancy had been peeking around the curtains. I don't know exactly where Jenna is, but she is with Steve's daughter Tallia. Nancy jumps out when I put my instruments away, but when we squeeze out the back door she has disappeared. I thought she went on stage during the next Slam Poet and back into the audience, but when I look she isn't there. I can't go in through the back so I have to walk past the M.C. into the curtains. There she is.
"Daddy, I have to go potty."
I take her out the back and find Jenna before sending them to the bathroom, together. I then go back into the auditorium to get my instruments. They weren't in the bathroom long enough to be done, were they? They don't respond when I call into the restroom. I call again.
"Nancy!" "Jenna!"
I start to pray, "Father please help me find those girls."
As I pray I worry about pedophiles. We had a sex-offender that lived across the street from us in North Ogden. The fear of abductors throws me back into constant vigilance of the kids on that cul-de-sac. Then the Sunday morning we called 911 because we couldn't find Jenna for over twenty minutes in Riverton flooded back. She had thought we were going to church and was eventually found at church walking out of a random Sacrament Meeting. I felt like a baby as I held Jenna and wept in front of the responding police officer. I abandon the instruments in the car and mentally prepare to fight for my daughter's lives. It isn't necessary. Nancy runs up to me when I walk in the doors. Time to go.
Nancy insists we race to the car. At Arctic Circle, the girls order ice cream cones and tater tots. I'm glad when the food comes because the play-place smells like residue from dirty bodies. In the car I ask Jenna if she noticed when Brother Barfuss lost his pick. She and I laugh. When we arrive home David is upset that I didn't go watch him so I remind him that we are going to the Demolition Derby together the next day. Ironically, Em had also gone to Arctic Circle with the other three kids and David and Jenna compare their spoils. When Em asks how it went I feel like the stories about playing are hollow and dead, but we laugh at the stories of the girls.
I wonder if today marks another coming to pass of Don McLean's "day the music died". Oh well, we failed. The failure doesn't seem so tragic though when you own the power over the life and death of a song. If a nameless band can kill a song then can it also bring it to life? Awe, hang it all...the family is back together and alive!
No comments:
Post a Comment