Daddy Don't Hit Me - May 9, 2007
Bringing 'It': Of Mice and Mozart
By BC Woods
Preston sat across from me at our cluster of four desks, and was prone to intruding on my privacy whenever he saw fit. He was also incredibly pissed at being cast as "Mozart's Uncle" in the second grade play and wanted to make sure that I didn't get anything better.
"Mozart. It says I'm going to play Mozart," I sighed, wishing that it had said something else.
"No fair! I'm telling my mom!" In silent agreement, Sam scooped a large clump of paste from his jar, looked suspiciously to either side, and sucked it off with his tongue before chewing it like a cow with a piece of cud. Usually, after swallowing a clump of paste that large, he would find a reason to go to the corner of the room and covertly swallow a few of his boogers, which he claimed gave him a "salt fix" to "balance things out."
"Wanna switch? I don't want to play Mozart." I attempted to hand my piece of paper to Preston, when Ms. Hitchens promptly announced, "There will be no switching. All casting decisions are final," while simultaneously taking Sam's paste jar away from him and favoring him with a full dose of the stink-eye.
As I so often did when I was a child, I sighed, looked down on the floor and muttered, "Poop" which at that time in my life had the approximate meaning of "Goddamn it." Sam, not understanding anything other than that he was no longer able to eat paste, began to cry silently at his desk. Preston ran to Ms. Hitchens' desk and complained about being cast in such a minimal role. He was one of the only rich kids to be stuck in a no-name part.
After class, Ms. Hitchens told me she had called my mother and told her I was expected to practice at least two hours every night to be adequately prepared to play the lead role.
"Ms. Hitchens, I don't want to play Mozart. Can't I just be a background mouse?"
"BC, none of the other children are as developed as you. You're the only one whose voice is deep enough."
"That's not fair!" I boomed at her. She was right though. As most awkward adults, I completed almost all of my growth before the age of fifteen. In second grade I was easily a foot taller than any of my other classmates, which made sitting in the school's one-size-fits-all desks as comfortable as a polar bear riding a tricycle.
"Go home, BC. You'll do fine."
When I got home, I tried to slink off to my room, only to find that my mother had suddenly become very interested in me. In fact, when my sister and I walked through the front door, she completely ignored Rachel in favor of me. This caused Rachel to loudly guffaw for several minutes, until she realized my mother was incapable of hearing her.
"BC? Is it true? Did you get cast as the lead in your school play?" The only other time her eyes gleamed as brightly was when she won a denim jacket at a local karaoke competition for singing "Total Eclipse of the Heart."
"Yeah, mom. I don't want to do it though. I don't think acting is cool. Plus I have to sing a lot of stupid songs." My mother's hands flew to her chest to restrain her heart from beating out of her chest. She suddenly looked at me the way Jerry Falwell might look at the second coming of Christ.
"Did..." she cleared her throat and waved her hands in front of her face in excitement. "Did you say you get to sing?" She bit her nails nervously, in anticipation of my answer.
Squirming back against a wall like a rabbit caught in headlights, I held my backpack in front of me and muttered, "Yeah." We spent the next three and a half hours practicing the music. Mostly, this consisted of me singing for one to two seconds and being told, "No, that's not good enough!" before my mother would sing the entire song several times to show me how to do it properly.
Over the next month, as the school prepared itself for my theatrical debut, I managed to piece together the fact that "Of Mice and Mozart" was about Mozart's life--and for some reason Mozart was followed everywhere he went by a very large number of mice who would suddenly pop up and provide narration on whatever he was doing at that moment in time. As I'd never seen a mouse compelled to speak, I found this to be quite perplexing. No matter how many times I voiced concerns over Mozart's hygiene, the only answer I ever received was: "Not everyone's voice is as deep as yours, BC."
Both at school and at home, I found myself subjected to special treatment on account of my voice. "No, BC! Deeper. Sing deeper." I would oblige until Ms. Hitchens' head rocked back and forth like a metronome. My fellow students, all wearing a set of construction paper mouse ears, would stare at me in slack-jawed awe as I sang with a baritone boom approximately equal to that of Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid.
"God BC, your voice sure is deep," Sam said.
"Don't worry, Sam. One day your voice will drop, too," Ms. Hitchens responded.
"Why?" Sam asked.
"Nevermind." With that, Ms. Hitchens would raise her baton in impotent orchestration, as approximately seventy second graders shuffled on stage, looked at their feet, and picked their collective noses. Through all of the coughing, the crying, and the poking, I was expected to sing songs about my deep love of music loud enough to drown out the rest of the children.
Only one person was not happy about my vocal abilities: My "wife," Sara Rietz.
From the costumes to the script, to the construction paper on the ears of all the children, to the stereo that played our instrumentals, Sara's mother had been the driving force of the school play. Sara had decided she was destined to become a singing sensation and was none too pleased that I had the power to drown her out on stage when we sang a duet as "husband and wife." This led to a confrontation first between us, and then between our mothers.
"BC, listen here," Sara said, having found me backstage. "My mother did not put all of this together for you to come on stage and groan like a church organ," Sara hissed.
Completely confused, wearing a pair of knickers and a frilly coat that were three of four sizes too small for me, I blinked at her for several seconds. "What are you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about!" Her face was suddenly in my chest. Not to say that she had wanted to place it there, rather I was simply too large for her to stick it in my face and threaten me.
"Sara, what are you doing?" I asked, feeling ungainly in my tight-fitting costume with the face of a fellow student buried in my sternum.
"Just you wait, BC. Just you wait and see."
That night, my mother got a phone call from Mrs. Rietz. I was awoken from the other side of the house, because this was no mere phone call. It was an epic battle between universal paradigms, distilled into human avatars to do war on the corporeal realm. It was in essence, the immovable object versus the unstoppable force.
"The hell you say! My son is going to sing his fucking heart out!"
"Oh yeah? Well he gets that loud mouth from me!"
For a full hour, Mastodon faced off against Tyrannosaurus, fighting with tooth, claw, and horn, sending each vicious swat as a series of electrical pulses down a phone line to be delivered to the face of their opponent as an orchestration of percussive sound waves. At long last, my mother slammed the phone onto its receiver like one of Zeus' thunderbolts. When it was over, she made her way to my room.
Although, I had no intention of doing otherwise, per the instructions she had already given me, I was expected to bring "it" to the stage with all the force I could muster.
"Do you hear me, BC? There's a reason they're afraid of you. You've got 'it' and you need to bring 'it' out on that stage and show 'it' to all of them. Do you hear me!"
Slightly afraid, I managed to place my head underneath my blankets halfway through the tirade. From within my cloth cave I murmured, "Yes, ma'am" and hoped she would disappear.
I felt a pat on the top of my head. She said, "You just remember to do it exactly like I showed you come curtain time, and it'll show them both," before closing the door and disappearing. I spent that night quivering under the covers, as I knew that curtain time was in three days, and I had always despised conflict.
The next few days contained relatively little hostility. I was told to "live with" the restrictions my tiny costume placed on my movements and just "sing for all I was worth." Sara repeatedly turned up the volume on her microphone, in an attempt to match pace with me, only to have it turned back down again every time Ms. Hitchens took it to a mouse that needed to read his or her lines. For my part, I tried to sing at a lower volume than previously, until I was yelled at to such an extent that I was forced to raise it again.
At curtain time, after having been sent to the backstage by my mother, I sat nervously for half an hour in my Lord Fauntleroy suit, as Sara and her mother murmured conspiratorially over the microphone. I began to sweat so profusely that Ms. Hitchens expressed concern I might ruin the frills of my white, tight-fitting silk shirt. Before this could be addressed, I was pushed out on to the stage, in time to show my "father" some music I had written and burst into song about my love of writing music. Several mice whispered half their lines about the course of my life, before giving up all together and crying in frustration. They had all been forced to wear gray sweatpants and sweatshirts. Even at that young age, I felt terribly sorry that they had been stripped of their individuality.
Feeling more and more self-conscious as the night wore on, due to various comments about that "big fucking whale of a kid" that drifted up from the audience in the small auditorium, as well as the mysterious tendency for Sara's microphone to become suddenly louder than mine, my voice began to fall. I would have cried from embarrassment, had it not been for the fact that I was garbed as seventeenth century nobility, and I knew that crying in such attire would have been in incredibly poor taste. It didn't help matters when I would look out into the audience and see my mother staring daggers at me every time my voice fell too low.
As Sara and I sang our climactic duet, whereby she decried my overriding passion for music and the pain she had suffered because of it, my microphone somehow magically lulled to almost total silence, causing Sara to wink at me, as we finished the song. As the curtains swished closed, she quickly ran offstage and hugged her mother, and they high-fived.
There was not going to be any high-five for me. There was no mother in the background to tamper with the microphones. I quickly took off my Lord Fauntleroy outfit, relishing my ability to take a full breath at long last. At least I was going to be comfortable during my inevitable lecture on not "bringing it." I took a seat on a wooden crate box, put my chin in my hands, and looked at the backstage door, waiting for it to open and unleash hell upon me.