The elementary school Christmas musical production season being upon us again like a cougar on a fawn, I am powerfully reminded of my own first experience in musical theater, the memory of which still makes my mother spit her apple tea across the table when I bring up such things as a hickory tree peeing in his pants, and a striped bass assaulting an eggplant, and, my mom's favourite moment, a young teacher cursing in Gaelic into her microphone near the end, and my dad's favourite moment, my kid brother Tommy suddenly singing When you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer, which was not in the script at all, and was something of a conundrum, as my dad says in his inimitable style, as the boy did not drink beer, no one in the house drank beer, and if any of us were to drink beer, certainly we would not be drinking such a vulgar amalgam of wet air and insipid jingles, purveyed in cans of suspicious origin, which is how my dad talks.
This production was in the auditorium of Saint John Vianney Grade School, near the Atlantic Ocean, which is how we came to have a striped bass, as the young teacher was a student of local flora and fauna, and allowed her charges, the fifth grade plus a few slumming kindergartners (thus my kid brother Tommy) to choose any local plant or animal to impersonate, although she overruled a few choices, like rumrunners and gunsels.
My memory is not what it used to be, but I have a clear memory of a ragged front line of ducks and potatoes, those being then the most famous products of our island, and then a taller motley back line of fish, bushes, trees, birds, deer, and a horseshoe crab, this being a boy whose mother worked in the theater.
My kid brother Tommy was a horse, which suited him, for you never saw a child who looked more like a horse, it was a stone miracle how that boy carried his head as a child, and I was an apple, because my mother had burned all her time on my weeping brother Tommy and left me to my sister, who draped me in a red