Friday, May 6, 2011

The Game

Those of you who also follow me on Twitter might have picked up from my desperate tweets (Somebody please make these fifth-graders stop farting!) that I’ve been spending a lot of my last couple of weeks playing piano for kids.

I’ve never claimed to be an especially great pianist. I can’t improvise. I’m not one of those musicians who can sit down and play anything by ear, though I might be able to plunk out the melody with an index finger and a whole lot of fumbling. I can’t transpose a piece from D to A-flat major, the way some of my friends can. But I can sit down in front of a piece of music and sight-read it well, and I’m fantastic at listening to a solo instrumentalist and following their musical instincts. Plus I don’t miss a whole lot of notes. Particularly on those occasions I’m present-minded enough actually to glance at the key signature at the beginning of the piece.

Certainly my skills are good enough to accompany a bunch of ten-year-old monkeys playing a three-part rendition of “We Will Rock You” written entirely in big fat quarter notes. Though inevitably there will be some little Suzuki savant who will want to play some spritely concerto that involves accidentals and sixteenth notes and other roadblocks that actually require me to pay attention.

I know a lot of music teachers in various school systems—all of them big ol’ lesbians. (Which is not so much a comment on their personal size, as on the sheer bulk of their lesbianism.) I’m not trying to imply that every female choral, orchestral, and band teacher in my metropolitan area happens to exhibit Sapphic tendencies . . . well, yeah, that’s totally what I’m saying. When Christmas and this time of year roll around, though, my piano-playing skills happen to be in demand. Those two periods are the height of the concert seasons, of the solo and ensemble festivals, and of the dreaded regionals, which are usually infinitely less exciting than they seem on Glee. So I get hired a lot.

The pay’s pretty good. But other than the noise and the smell of post-lunch farts and of gym socks and that vaguely horsey odor of the prepubescent, and other than the prospect of having to play the Boccherini Minuetto eleventy-billion times, the main reason I sometimes dread going into the schools where one of my friends is teaching is because I know I’m going to have to play The Game.

Ah, The Game. That’s the short version of an amusement my teacher friends leave with the unspoken title of Guess Which Of My Students Will Someday Be A Future Full-Fledged Card-Carrying Homosexual American Citizen? I first heard of it years ago, when the teachers would compare notes over dinner or drinks, like this:

BAND TEACHER 1: That little short kid with the dark hair who wore the blue T-shirt. . . .
BAND TEACHER 2: Dale? Oh, you think so? Yeah, I could see it. But if so, he’ll be the closeted type with a twink boyfriend on the side and four kids in the minivan.
1: And that one with the curls. . . .
2: Justin? No way!
1: No, not Justin. The one with the blond curls.
2: Oh, Adam? Well duh! Totally! And let me tell you, that Bible-thumping mother of his is going to freak out when he comes popping out of the closet.

I didn’t believe in The Game for a long time. In fact, at first I refused to play it when Marian, one of my teacher friends, cornered me after one of her choir rehearsals. Scarcely had I finished playing the last bars of “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie” than she shooed her charges from the classroom and beetled over. “So?” she asked.

“So what?” I wanted to know.

“So!” she said, impatient with my obliviousness. “Which ones?”

“Which ones what?” I was baffled.

“Which ones are going to be fam-i-ly?” she growled, sotto voce. “Play The Game!”

It was then that I remembered The Stupid Game. “Ohhhh,” I said, finally understanding. I looked around the room at the graceless homunculi loping in from the hall. “Marian, they’re ten,” I pointed out.

“Trust me,” she said, standing up to take control of the classroom once again. “You can tell. You. Can. Tell. You can pooh-pooh it now, but ask any teacher. All I need is a few minutes in any classroom and I can tell you exactly who, in eight years time, is going to be adding me on Facebook and will have a profile that reads ‘I am: A Man/Interested in: Men. You look at the next class. Then we’ll compare notes.”

Throughout the rest of the morning I studied the class when I wasn’t playing the piano, knowing that I was going to be grilled later on. Sure enough, the moment that the students began to file back to their homerooms, Marian shot over. “Well?” she asked.

“The little boy with that cowlick?” I replied, uncertainly.

“NO,” she said, in the same acid tone Anne Robinson employs when she tells someone that he is the Weakest Link—goodbye! “WRONG.”

“Jesus Christ, woman,” I said, peeling myself from the cinderblock wall against which she’d blasted me.
 
“Try again!”

I sighed. “These children are barely self-conscious yet. They’re bundles of impulse and reaction, still testing the world around them with hypotheses they can hardly express. That anything—anything—can be predicted about their futures and their potential is a fallacy in and of itself. Therefore—“

“Shut your fat trap and try again,” she growled.

“Fine. How about the little girl who was over on the left?” I asked weakly, pointing to the approximate area where she’d stood. Marian shook her head, needing more to go on. “She had on a white sweater? The one with the really, really short hair?” The girl in question had sported little more than a fine buzzed down on her head that made her look as if she were a nascent political protestor. She looked like Sinead O’Connor about to rip the Pope’s photo in half. If she wasn’t being raised by lesbian parents, there was at least a highly-militant mother somewhere in the background. "She looked all punk-y."

"Emily?" she asked, astonished. I shrugged. I didn't know the girl's name. “Oh sweetie.” Marian looked at me with pity in her eyes, then patted my leg with unsuppressed condescension. “Emily just got back to school last week. She's our little cancer survivor.”

Last night I was sitting in a stinking, stuffy gymnasium doubling as an auditorium, where an 88-piece orchestra of fifth-graders hopped up on, and farting from, their dinners bounced nervously in their chairs while their families waited for the concert to start. My teacher friend, who’d managed single-handedly to tune all the instruments while coping with the thousand student questions that pop up at these things, was busily trying to string a microphone cord between chairs so she could get the concert going.

Nearby, a kid sporting a violin tucked his instrument beneath his arm and ran his fingers through his Justin Bieber hair. “Hey JONAH!” he yelled out to a friend in the cello section. “Did you see the LADY GAGA VIDEO for ‘Judas’? It came out today!” His friend shouted out something I couldn’t hear through the hubbub. “I know, it was SUPPOSED to debut on Entertainment Weekly tonight but it leaked on YouTube earlier! I've watched it like, a hundred and seventy-four times after school. The dancing is SICK. I know, right? They're like...!” Then, still clutching his violin, he pulled out some of the moves that Gaga’s considerably buffer and less formally-dressed dancers typically execute. He looked a little like a hip-hop fiddler on the roof, but I have to hand it to the kid, he had all kinds of fabulous going on. “And she's like, I'm in love with Judas, Joooo-das! You just know Britney’s going to SPIT GLITTER!”

My teacher friend was regarding me steadily, with her eyebrows raised. “That one,” I said to her, discreetly pointing.

Her hand over the mic, she pulled her mouth into a wry moue. “Ya think?”

“And that, ladies and gentlemen,” I said, making a pantomime of spitting on my hands and rubbing them together, “is how you play The Game.”

“Oh, sweetie.” She patted me on the back and adopted a baby-talk voice. “Helen Keller could’ve picked out that one. From thirty miles away. But you are awfully cute.”

“Whatever,” I grumbled.

She might have made me feel as if I’d only just managed to hit an extremely large inflatable beach ball with an equally outside child’s bat, but at least I was still in The Game.

19 comments:

  1. Hahaha. I know teachers play that game all the time. And once you do come out as a student they always want your imputed too. I was never really good at playing, not cuz my gaydar sucks, but mostly because I didn't care. I say, let them be young and innocent while they can and judge them later.

    -Ace

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  2. you could play the moonlight sonata on my body every night :)

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  3. Ace,

    Kids get judged at school all the time. That's what teachers do, when grading and evaluating. I don't think my friends really care about their kids' orientations. They're just all uniformly of the opinion that sexuality is one of those innate things that it's possible for the well-intentioned and attuned to start identifying even in the years before puberty.

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  4. Philipp,

    As long you as you don't mean the third movement. That thing's a bitch.

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  5. Ah, yes.....my partner and I used to play to see who was FIT: Fag In Training....

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  6. Rob,

    I didn't mean to sound like I was upset with the teachers. I think that the game is pretty funny and usually they end up being right. I just meant that I, personally, just don't care about the sexuality of others, young or old, unless I'm sexually interested in them. My friends play a similar game with our profs (with 2 extra categories: experimented and wants to) but I don't really play that either. It just isn't a thought that ever crosses my mind.

    -Ace

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  7. I think my Kid may be called a "graceless homunculus" in the very near future. (He has a dictionary. He can look it up.)

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  8. I wasn't AS obvious as that kid there, but all the signs were there. I like to say I came out of the closet when I was 5 and asked my parents for a My Little Pony.

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  9. It finally clicked in my head (and I'm ashamed that it's taken this long for that to happen) that you write in the tradition of Charles Dickens and Armistead Maupin - individually vivid incidents that all ultimately connect to each other with marvellously "right" yet surprising joints between them, a flowing series of vignettes that add up so so much more than one alone can provide. One of these days, if you aren't already doing it, I hope you'll take these pieces and reposition them relative to each other - take the individual shards and shape them into a mosaic. This connects so well to your entries on piano-playing, childhood identity (for example, you and Topher), art-before-audiences (your in-the-audience-for-ballet scenes), etc. The individual pieces are beautiful - and the evolving "whole" is every day becoming so much more than the sum of the individual parts. Bravo, Rob.

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  10. At first The Game seemed smug. But if I had to live with all that tooting and scraping, I'd probably think different.

    Poor Luigi. That blasted minuet is unfair to him. But Breeder was fair to the kids, who must blast in ways too foul to dwell on. Interesting read! Critical? Maybe. Mean? I doubt it.

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  11. Such a terrific post. NOW I have to go through and read your WHOLE BLOG. Sheesh.

    My nephew, with whom I'm very close/involved, is in the 5th grade. There was one kid in his school, one year ahead of him, who was extremely, uh, musical. And had been for years. He played mainly with the girls. He was v. expressive. Very awkward, but got better. His last year at school, he headlined the school play (George III, if you please) and had clearly found his metier. At this school, diversity is prized and to my knowledge, he had none of the typical problems for such a kid.

    I'm actually too dense to play the game otherwise.

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  12. FelchingPisser,

    I like your acronym!

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  13. Dawn,

    The phrase does have a certain bludgeon-like quality suitable for use around the house.

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  14. Martin,

    I did my first Carol Channing impression at the age of six after seeing Thoroughly Modern Millie. You can reason away a pony toy, but it's tough to refute the hard evidence of a junior Miss Channing singing "Jazz Baby."

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  15. Jon,

    I appreciate the compliment, especially since Dickens is my favorite author. It's kind of tough to say there's much design in the way these stories fit together, because after all I'm not fashioning them for fictional people in a fictional world—I'm simply writing about my life, and naturally the stories are going to dovetail.

    But while there's really no forethought on my part about how they might do so, I recognize the spirit of generosity that prompted the comment and really do thank you for it. It was handsome.

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  16. 1:52 Anonymous,

    I'm very sorry that you found a post with an obviously tongue-in-cheek tone to be 'smug.' I hope your future visits, if you make any, will not produce similar results.

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  17. Jason,

    I'm glad you enjoyed the post. If you go back and read all the past entries, however . . . pace yourself. That's my only advice.

    I don't think, when my teacher friend play The Game, that they spot the students based solely on characteristics that are feminine (for the boys) or tomboyish (for the girls). When they've articulated their instincts to me at length, I can see that in the students they're predicting will grow up to be gay there's an element of separation, of apart-ness—almost as if the kids know from instinct that they're different from the others.

    Sure, there's often a Gaga-crazed nascent gay boy lurking in the violins, or a little bull dyke beneath the choir robes. But usually the kids are just average, doted-upon, everyday smelly little monkeys with a trace of something of which they are yet unaware.

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  18. Breeder, there is a kid in the nephew's class who who's a slightly wilder standard 10 year old boy, but whom I have thought will be gay or bi; I'm not even sure why I think that. But you've raised an interesting issue.

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  19. The added benefit of FIT (Fag In Training) was that in case any stage mothers were around all they'd hear was "Wow, the Artful Dodger is particularly FIT today..." and she'd natter on to us about how he was the only boy in the gymnastics class and he was doing SO well....

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