What is it about gleefully dark human nature stories that makes you want to look away and feel shame for taking glee at them, yet you cannot?
Many years ago, near Thanksgiving, my daughter’s preschool conducted a study of Native Americans, presumably under the innocent auspices of friendly Thanksgiving dealings; full of caring and sharing between the Natives and the European intruders. One of the goals of her class was to play music at their Autumn Feast (even at a mixed, fee-based preschool, one must be PC.) To do this, children created their own instruments.
Using oatmeal tubs and paper towel rolls donated by families, the class embarked upon a craft adventure one might refer to as a “Craftivity.” Meaning, your craft is something you will later use to do something else. Never as popular as the “Crame,” combination of craft and game, it can be quite useful in a multitasking world hungry for crossover appeal.
My daughter’s class drew various Native designs–scribbles of children wielding markers in an undirected manner–on construction paper. They covered the grinning Quaker man with that construction paper, as his face would detract from their drumming prowess. After a paste-on of glue-dripping, tar-pit schematics, the drum was complete.
For the paper towel tube drumstick, no construction paper nonsense was necessary. The children colored right onto the tubes themselves; further weight to their earthy appeal. My daughter’s drumstick featured a few lengthwise blue and red streaks, interconnected and crisscrossed. A few lima beans inside, a few slapped-on feathers outside, some blue tape at either end of the tube, and the drumsticks were ready. This seemingly harmless design provided for the musical disaster which endured in comedic memory.
Parents were not invited to the classroom performance, but the director sang its praises in her newsletter, as the performance for the younger rooms was “a delight” and “a true example of the spirit of the season.”
My daughter, never one to be passive in a musical performance, must have created a few moments of panic when her drumstick broke. Fortunately, a nearby teacher swooped in with the requisite gob of blue tape to clog and reseal the end of the tube.
By the time the drum arrived home, the broken end had been handled and reshaped so many times that it no longer resembled a drumstick as much as a hand-crafted phallus.
Call it a homemade “device” if you will. Just don’t let my wife hear you–she was greatly displeased when I asked her exactly what they were teaching our daughter at this school, suggesting the innuendo created by the look of said tube. With the bulging end and now-creepy-looking blue and red lines running the length of the “shaft,” I could not have been the only parent that day to have considered it a bit wrong.
Perhaps it was just that my mind ran downhill in such ways, even if I did spend considerable effort to cover this up in front of my children. Believe me, holding one’s tongue is not always so easy.
Our daughter gathered us in the kitchen for a reenactment of her performance later that day. She sang a song and whacked away at the drum with varying degrees of rhythmic success, finishing with a grand finale in which she wordlessly hammered the drum. Then there was chanting and such rapid smacks of the drum that the local cults might truly have been proud.
Then again, I doubt any natives would have been shouting, “I’m beating it!” as they hammered away on their toms. If only the phallic end of the drumstick she used to hammer the drum had not burst and with a violent spray of white beans, sending them skittering across kitchen linoleum.
Any restraint I practiced up to that moment died. If it had not, I might not have had to explain to my daughter why Daddy was laughing at the burst end of her drumstick and the blobs of beans all over the floor. She showed so much concern as she asked me what was wrong, why I was laughing and crying. With tears on my cheeks: “Um, let’s see, well, Daddy was….”