All About the Choices

  

            “It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” – J.K. Rowling (Chamber of Secrets).

            If the above quote is to be believed, I am a misogynistic, racist, creepy and inappropriate old coot who has been humored by his friends and students that secretly loathe and despise him.  Let me see if I can’t prove this to be true by citing a few examples.

            If you teach high school kids, you are supposed to be on the lookout for the dreaded double entendre’.  None-the-less, at one time or another, I have said the following to a group of students:

“Flutes, just sit there and finger your parts.”

“If you would grease it, it wouldn’t get stuck.”

“Clarinets, are every one of you determined to be flat?”

“More tongue, More tongue.”

“We are going to do 69 over and over again until you get it right.”

            Not only are all of those pretty creepy and a little disgusting coming from a teacher…. they are also pretty creepy and a little disgusting coming from a teacher.   The immediate aftermath of such a statement is usually uncontrollable laughter from every kid in the room.  This happens partly because being 15 or 16 years old means your life revolves around inappropriate and partly because it is fun to realize that your band director is more of a child than you are.  I would like to state for the record that I never pre-planned any such utterances and I was usually not the first one to notice I had done so. 

            Deciding on what Show to do (either full marching band or drum line / indoor guard) is the product of much thought and deliberation.  Somewhere in all of that should come the determination not to offend some large segment of the community with your choices.  To that end, I chose to do shows based on:

Sexual abuse at summer camp – Tommy (Full Band)

Physical abuse by a boyfriend – Silent All These Years (Indoor Guard)

Satan Worship – Scream (Indoor Drum Line)

            Most folks are not aware of the storyline behind the rock opera Tommy.  I only knew that I liked the music and it presented an opportunity for some unique visual elements.  Also, Kevin really wanted to do it.  When the indoor guard instructor came to me about “Silent All These Years”, I really didn’t clue in on the lyrics (anti-Christ yellin’ at me again…) until I saw the work that went with it.  At that point it is too late in the process to change tunes so I softened up the work so much that, for those judges who knew the subject matter of the song, we took a real beating in competition.

            The Drum Line show was intended to make fun of horror movies and all of the elements that are stereotypical to horror movies.  We had music from Scream, the Exorcist, and other scary movies.  We went to Dayton for WGI World Championships and made finals in the World Class finishing in eighth place.  About 2 weeks after we got home, a grandmother of one of my kids showed up at my office door with the preacher from Germantown Baptist Church.  Evidently the drum line show had been discussed at great length in her Sunday school class and the “Satanic” nature of the show was inappropriate for school kids.  The conversation turned to what I could do to make this right.  I agreed I had been a very bad man and would never do the show again which they thought was extremely generous as a solution.  Keep in mind that this was 2 weeks AFTER WGI Dayton. We had already moved on to planning for the next fall. 

            As far as being racist, I mention this last decision.  In 2004, we did a show entitled “Jake Diamond, Private Eye.”  The show had a stage and a storyline about a detective (Brandon) that stalks and eventually kills a bad guy to protect the Femme Fatale (Jessica Wang).  The part of the bad guy had to be played by someone who could wear “wall walkers”, basically strap on stilts, and not fall down.  It was extremely physically demanding.  Fred Dorsett really wanted to play that part so I agreed.  At the end of the show, Jake Diamond shoots Fred.  Yep…… Fred is black and the fact that he is black never occurred to me until the contest before Bandmasters where a judge said, “In this day and time, are you really comfortable shooting a black guy to end your show?”  Well, when you put it that way…..  With a week to go before the final contest, all I could do was ask Fred and his father (who worked at Houston) how they felt about it.  They said they were fine with it and the rest is (thankfully) history. 

           

            These days, everything is so politically correct and the focus is on everyone to get it exactly right.  For those of you who allowed me to make mistakes (of which these are but a few of many), thanks for judging me kindly and patiently.  For those of you just now realizing how rude and thoughtless I really was, not only has the statute of limitations run out on all of the above, but I have already escaped.  Noodles!