Seed: I was a middle-aged zombie
Last week I attended yet another concert. My son had to be there a half hour early, orchestra shirt pressed and clean, viola tuned and ready to go. I brought a book, hoping to get at least a chapter read while I waited. (At least this time we had real seats, not those uncomfortable bleachers native to every middle school gymnasium.) Of course, my hope was in vain. Girls on cell phones flapped around in flip-flops while boys followed a few feet behind, feigning disinterest. Mothers harassed their over-stimulated toddlers, fathers jittered their legs nervously, dying for a cigarette, each of us wishing to be anywhere but where we were. I’m all for showcasing my child’s growing musical abilities, but how many times must I be subjected to a slightly off-key Pachelbel’s Canon?
As I looked around at the hollow-eyed parents, run ragged by after-school sports activities, music lessons, awards ceremonies, gymnastics classes, and martial arts lessons, an image popped into my head. We all looked like zombies, mindlessly lurching toward some unreachable goal, seeking an unknown cure to relieve our pain. And my next thought was – wouldn’t it be really cool if we turned into zombies?
If ever I could transform into a zombie, it would have been at an awards ceremony, or "round-up" last fall, when, while waiting for my kid to receive his Student of the Month certificate, the school principal made us listen to the Pledge of Allegiance, Student Pledge, Teacher Pledge, a recitation of the school's core characteristics (perserverance, citizenship, respect, etc.), the Pledge of Allegiance, Star Spangled Banner, and the school song. As it went on and on, I started to feel like a member of the doomed People's Temple Group, watching as Jim Jones distributed the Kool-Aid. My bottom became numb. Small children wrestled free from their mothers' arms, breaking into sobs when they were once gain herded into strollers and buckled up. Grandparents adjusted their hearing aids. It was interminable.
Imagine the power of zombie transformation. In the middle of a reading of the school lunch menu, I would experience something akin to an out-of-body experience. I wouldn't even remember what had happened, only coming to my senses hours later, drenched in blood, a slightly sour aftertaste in my mouth, and the unfamiliar reflection of fear and loathing in the eyes of people I meet. Finally.
I'll bet it would cut down on scheduled after-school activities. "Remember, let's keep the program short, or parents will start turning into zombies."
Labels: concerts, school events, Zombies
posted by Adjective Queen @ 2:26 PM,
,
Response: There's No More Room In Hell
Zombies? Sure, zombification would be a welcome relief to me at school events. From the moment I retrieve the garishly-hued flyer from my daughter’s Take Home Folder advising me of my obligation to attend the next all-school musical revue to the moment I hear the first note of an adapted Yanni song, I take a spiritual and emotional beating. I like your idea of a transformation, Queen, but I’m not sure how I’d like it to happen.
It begins, like all other traumatic event cycles, with denial. “Didn’t I have a colonoscopy scheduled that night?” “Isn’t that my night to pickup trash on the highway?” I go through all the stages of the Kubler-Ross grief cycle – I even try intercessory prayer, “Lord, prithee a termite infestation upon the grand piano of Ms. Smith the music teacher…” – but ultimately I plunk down into the uncomfortable steel-framed, rough-upholstered, universal large-open-area-meeting-space-chair resigned to my fate. I then spend the next two hours fuming and scowling, willing the possibility that Dr. Jekyll and Bruce Banner were characters based on even the slimmest splinter of truth, thereby allowing me a guilt-free rampage through the venue unburdened by any memories of the destruction.
Every year for the Christmas gala, no fewer than 1000 people cram into the hall to hear their child, grandchild, niece or nephew intone a dozen schmaltzy “winter songs” in unison with 100 other kids. The kids mumble tangentially through lyrics featuring every known new age euphemism for Christmas while Ms. Smith pounds away monotonously on the ol’ Steinway. Meanwhile hundreds of video cameras whir and cameras flash. I’ve tried everything to cope with the skull-scraping boredom of waiting – Gameboys, crosswords, sleeping, ogling soccer moms – and all I get are disapproving looks from the other parents and admonitions from the wife, “It’s not fair to the other parents,” she says.
Fair? I thought we were all in this together. I thought we all suffered the shrill stabs of children singing. I thought we all wanted to sneak in the night before and plant an IED in the piano set to detonate when a b flat was struck. I thought we were all there because we didn’t want to be the one who wasn’t there; the one everyone else labels the bad parent for not being there. That’s when I’d like to become Norma Rae. Once transformed into a mousy mill-working mom I would ascend the stage and plead with everyone to stand together and put an end to this travesty of musical education. I have a feeling the comedown’d be a bitch, though. I’d probably find myself in the backseat of a black Trans-Am gripping a strangely aerodynamic piece of a nun’s habit.
But the awards ceremonies...you're right. If any human event cries out for voodoo remedies, it's school awards ceremonies. You can never find a seat because a couple of obnoxious ladies always go to the venue straight from work and cordon off ten rows of seats for every known relative of little Susie and then guard them like a half-starved pit bull in a southside trailer park. Practically every student gets an award, every name is excruciatingly read aloud and everyone applauds while the kid clumsily shuffles across the stage to pick up his faux parchment affirmation fresh off the office printer. Inevitably, some family blurts out the old disco, "woot! woot!" That's when I begin feeling undead.
Labels: school events, Zombies
posted by St. Fiacre @ 2:20 PM,
,
Response: Send More Paramedics
That’s what one of the zombies requests over the radio in the ambulance in “Return of the Living Dead” when he and his dinner guests have finished noshing on the brains of the first rescue vehicle-full of yummy paramedics. Send more.
Like students to American public schools, send me more brains to be devoured. Give me your youthful, your lads, your impressionable lasses yearning to be Paris Hilton, or some other wretched excess, some teeny bore.
Surely you don’t really want to become a zombie. Zombies are what the people around you at these functions already are. Of course those high school grads shuffle across the stage to claim their diplomas. How else can they walk? They’ve been in training for 12 years to become good little consumers-occasional voters-workplace drones, just like everyone else. It’s ironic that zombies eat brains since that is the one organ we’re not taught to use when in school and can easily live without after graduation.
To use another movie plot point, society congratulates anyone who becomes a pod person, welcoming him or her to the fold. (I can mix metaphors all day.)
So my praise goes out to those who can get through the system without becoming zombies, the ones who know the rules (“get born, keep warm, short pants, romance, learn to dance, get dressed, get blessed, try to be a suck cess”) but whose parents encourage them to side step them.
Don’t send more paramedics, who are just fodder for zombiedom. Anything but that.
Labels: conformity, public schools, Zombies
posted by Anonymous @ 2:18 PM,
,
Response: Time of the Season
Father give me the Bull of Heaven,
So he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling.
If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,
I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the doorposts, and leave the doors flat down,
And will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!
It will be awful! – From the Epic of Gilgamesh
Is it already that time of year again? I’m talking of course, about the time when the dead rise up from the grave to claim the souls of fallible elementary school children worldwide. With promises of official sounding awards, colorful placards, and an endless stream of felicitations, zombie like creatures are taking over the whole of humanity. Who could resist the call of such glorious temptation? I know I couldn’t.
It seems like yesterday, when as a gangly lad of twelve, I marched proudly forth to claim my Outstanding Young Person’s Leadership Award. In an audacious display of breakneck brown-nosing, I had managed to convince my gullible sixth grade teacher that I was not only a man among boys, but also not the person responsible for sticking an eraser in her coffee. In case you were wondering, I haven’t won as much as a Scooby Doo Pez dispenser since. The Outstanding Young Person’s Leadership Award was handed out annually to children in the sixth grade who exhibited promising leadership characteristics by none other than the dreaded Freemasons.
I gave the event little thought beforehand, but when the actual award day came, I found myself more than nervous. My parents looked as proud as ever as we drove to the official ceremony, but we all seemed at least remotely aware that we were headed into some sort of devious trap. My old man chattered on and on about how his dad was a Mason in a pathetic attempt to hide his own anxieties as to what the evening held in store for us.
Upon arrival, my family and I, (dressed to the ni…sixes for the occasion), were ushered through the temple hallway, and led into a large rectangular dining area which reeked of haphazard mid 60s decorating. We were greeted by a multitude of fellow award winners and their parents. A catered meal of roast beef and potatoes was provided and we were all treated to a less than stellar rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. The boy seated across from me said he was going to be in a commercial for White Water. I didn’t believe him.
The whole affair was so far removed from anything I’d witnessed up to that point that I found myself genuinely breathless. All around us stood an array of men in cheap suits congratulating themselves on the various noble civic deeds they had performed that week. Talk about zombies; these folks looked like something out of the “Thriller” video.
And then the procession began. The incantation pronounced by the Worshipful Master, or lodge president, sounded something like Vincent Price on Dexedrine:
“Humble lodge dwellers, I am filled with thanks that you are in my presence. Standing before you today are both the best and brightest of our local youth, prime examples of the much needed value of leadership in today’s society. Our Masonic Lodge remains, as in the time of our great forebears, a pillar of moralistic stability and a fount of ancient wisdom. Fellow masons, please join me in welcoming these future entered apprentices and their esteemed families.” (muffled applause)
The whole event seemed ridiculous, as if I’d wandered into the staging of a lost Honeymooners’ episode. But instead of being appointed Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler of the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Raccoons, I was forced to sit through a barrage of mind-numbing observations by various Masonic brass. First there was the Worshipful Master, then the Junior Warden, then the Tyler (whatever the hell that is), and finally a not-so-brief prayer from a bespectacled clergyman. And I’m not sure, but I think even the caterer chimed in on the importance of leadership. I was trapped. My parents were of no use either. My father’s eyes were half-shut and drool pooled at the corner of his lips, a sure sign that he was far off in Slumberland. And the stare on my mother’s face betrayed a look of obvious malaise.
And suddenly I realized my fate. I was going to spend the rest of my life trapped among people who related their life to architecture. In an act of sheer desperation, I leaned over to the ginger faced girl to my right and asked, “Will this ever end?” She didn’t respond, but she looked beyond frightened, her red curls swaying along to the rhythm of the ceiling fan.
And then at last we were called forth to claim our awards. One by one, my fellow honorees nervously approached the podium. Then it was my turn. The Worshipful Master, or should I say Thee Worshipful Master, stretched out a sweaty palm and remarked, “Well done Bunky. Someday we hope you return to the Masonic fold.”
Not likely brother. Not likely.
posted by A Contemporary Bunkshooter @ 2:16 PM,
,
