Voices: Part One
Yesterday afternoon I went up to my kids’ elementary school for an assembly. One by one, each grade took the stage and sang a couple of numbers, starting with the first graders and ending with the about-to-graduate fifth graders.
What is it about children singing? They could be singing, oh, I don’t know, “Fat Bottomed Girls,” and I’d probably cry. And when it’s “The Happy Wanderer,” sung by second graders (including my daughter), who chose that song themselves, well, I’m a goner. Mush ain’t in it.
If the pure innocent sound of seven-year-old voices rising up in song isn’t enough for you, add this to the picture: they sang well. The music teacher at our school is amazing, a jewel in the crown of the Ann Arbor Public Schools. By the time these kids graduate they know the difference between their head voice and their chest voice, they can read music, they can sing in four-part harmony. Yeah, the fifth graders sang a round in four parts, a capella, in a minor key, with large intervals and some dissonance. Sang it beautifully.
But I’m not done, oh no. The assembly finished off with a slide show compiled of the baby pictures and current pictures of the graduating fifth graders (among them, my son). And while the slide show played, the fifth graders sang a medley of tear jerkers that included “School Days” and “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” The only thing that saved me at all during this was the peals of laughter from the kids as each drooling toothless infant was revealed to be Eddie or Lizzie or, ha ha, the school principal.
All this by way of explanation for why, when my fifth-grader Joey arrived home with two of his buddies in tow and a request that they stay for dinner, all I could say was yes.
Voices: Part Two
Joey eats, sleeps, and breathes Dungeons & Dragons. It’s been a major source of frustration to him that none of his friends at school are into it. After about a year of failed attempts he finally managed to get his two buddies, Drew and Cedric, reasonably proficient at the game, and yesterday afternoon they had their first real dungeon-crawl. They played at the kitchen table, and I made a point of keeping myself busy in the kitchen too, so I could listen in. Oh, you couldn’t buy that kind of entertainment!
Drew was playing a paladin, which, by the way, he insisted on pronouncing with the accent on the second syllable. At one point they captured an orc. They tried to interrogate him (I wish you could have heard Dungeon Master Joey’s fake cockney accent as he played the orc) but the orc prevaricated. Drew then declared he was going to kill it, and I could not resist stirring things up a bit.
“What?” I interjected. “You’re a lawful good paladin and you’re just going to kill a poor helpless tied-up creature? That’s not right!”
Drew looked crestfallen for a moment, but then he brightened. “Ok, I won’t kill it. Cedric, you kill it.”
“But that’s just as bad,” I sputtered. Joey agreed, and Drew soon bowed under the joint force of our righteous indignation.
“I shoulda been a church inquisitor,” I heard Drew mutter in disgust.
6 Comments
Funny — after having clicked over to the Wikipedia link, I’ve decided that a lot of politicians in power seem to be Neutral Evil!
Heh heh, yes. And others are just neutral stupid.
Aw, Megan’s fifth grade graduation made me cry, and they didn’t even sing in 4-part harmony. :)
The D&D bit cracked me up. I don’t understand half of what I hear Megan and her dad talk about, but I love listening to it. Yay for geeks!
What great stories. They make me appreciate how short a time kids stay little while at the same time looking forwrd to big-kidness with eagerness. Thanks :)
Yeah! I love it when people sing in a group of any age or ability. There’s been times in school assembly that I’ve teared up too. And there’s been a TV series on here called The Choir of Hard Knocks which is a choir of homeless and otherwise disenfranchised people. I couldn’t watch past the first episode…
Have you ever listened to The Langley Schools Music Project CD titled “Innocence and Despair”? It’s comprised of recordings made in 1976-77 of a rural Canadian grade school choir (kids aged 9-12) singing 60s and 70s pop songs by the likes of the Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, and David Bowie. It was never intended to be a commercial venture, but someone happened upon the recordings many years after the fact, found them extraordinarily moving, and made a CD of them which became a surprise hit when it was released in 2001. It’s the purity of the kids’ voices that make listening to it such an extraordinary experience. Some of the songs make me a bit weepy every time I listen them. If you haven’t heard it, I highly recommend tracking down a copy.