One evening, a lifetime of mockery
I'm sure we've all been involved in one. School performances. That one time you decided to tap dance in the talent show, the karaeoke concert sponsored by the student council, the grade school concert where you wound up singing the same damn line in Hebrew over and over until your head would explode.
Mine is on tape for posterity. Two years after my class performed one of the grade nine's older sister appeared in class the first day of school and broke into hysterics at the memory of the tape she saw. I'm sure it's even more humiliating on tape than it was live.
You see, this tale of woe is a lengthy story. So sit back and rewind to the weeks before winter break in grade eight. Ours is a small school, a total population, kindergarten through to grade nine, of fifty odd students. My class was nine people. Two girls, seven boys.
We had a class stereo system on which we played music agreed upon by the class and teacher. Mainly the Beatles. One day the music teacher came in and said that we were to make a sort of musical production for the so-called Winter Pageant.
We blinked.
She said we were to write a play and include musical numbers. Why didn't we sing some Beatles songs? We liked the Beatles.
We blinked.
She told us that we would also be performing the Gilbert and Sullivan song "Modern Major General," and insisted upon Paul Simon's "Homeless." The Beatles song were to be "Yesterday" and "When I'm Sixty-Four."
We had to write a play using those songs and then sing them.
So Ian Strung rose to the challenge. He formulated the first scene. An old man would be sitting on a bench and a teenager was to walk across the stage with a boom box on his shoulder blasting heavy metal. The old man was then to shout, "That sounds like an ox with its leg stuck in a trash compactor!" Everything went downhill from there.
He was to then suggest that in his day music was better and then we were to break into "Modern Major General." For those who have never heard it, it is a quickly sung song, a solo. We sang the first verse en masse:
I am the very model of a modern major general
I've information vegetable animal and mineral
I know the kings of England and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical
Then the teen was to ask the old man how old he was prompting the song "When I'm Sixty-Four." The old man would then get melancholy and the first verse of "Yesterday" was to be sung, then finally, another person was to waltz onstage and tell the two that the 'real scene' was with World music. Cue Paul Simon.
Tale TBC...
SCWLC
Mine is on tape for posterity. Two years after my class performed one of the grade nine's older sister appeared in class the first day of school and broke into hysterics at the memory of the tape she saw. I'm sure it's even more humiliating on tape than it was live.
You see, this tale of woe is a lengthy story. So sit back and rewind to the weeks before winter break in grade eight. Ours is a small school, a total population, kindergarten through to grade nine, of fifty odd students. My class was nine people. Two girls, seven boys.
We had a class stereo system on which we played music agreed upon by the class and teacher. Mainly the Beatles. One day the music teacher came in and said that we were to make a sort of musical production for the so-called Winter Pageant.
We blinked.
She said we were to write a play and include musical numbers. Why didn't we sing some Beatles songs? We liked the Beatles.
We blinked.
She told us that we would also be performing the Gilbert and Sullivan song "Modern Major General," and insisted upon Paul Simon's "Homeless." The Beatles song were to be "Yesterday" and "When I'm Sixty-Four."
We had to write a play using those songs and then sing them.
So Ian Strung rose to the challenge. He formulated the first scene. An old man would be sitting on a bench and a teenager was to walk across the stage with a boom box on his shoulder blasting heavy metal. The old man was then to shout, "That sounds like an ox with its leg stuck in a trash compactor!" Everything went downhill from there.
He was to then suggest that in his day music was better and then we were to break into "Modern Major General." For those who have never heard it, it is a quickly sung song, a solo. We sang the first verse en masse:
I am the very model of a modern major general
I've information vegetable animal and mineral
I know the kings of England and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical
Then the teen was to ask the old man how old he was prompting the song "When I'm Sixty-Four." The old man would then get melancholy and the first verse of "Yesterday" was to be sung, then finally, another person was to waltz onstage and tell the two that the 'real scene' was with World music. Cue Paul Simon.
Tale TBC...
SCWLC