I had recently become a mom and the five of us were living in a tiny little house (under 1,000 square feet) in Van Nuys. Bob was on the road a lot back then and I was left to take care of three little girls - babies really - on my own. I was never much good at playing dolls and blocks and mud pies - to say nothing of the fact that I was exhausted, but I did try to get them excited about music.
As it happened, one of my favorite pieces of music was "Appalachian Spring". It had been "given" to me by a former boyfriend on my 32nd birthday. He was insanely romantic but he turned out to be a d-ck* - forgiven over time, but a d-ck nonetheless. (Note* I struggled over the right adjective but for the sake of accuracy, this was the only word that fit - please forgive my use of it.)
Anyway.
This amazing piece of music had become central to my collection. It is a sweepingly epic piece (nearly half an hour) and you truly can close your eyes and get lost in the images it evokes - a whole musical story. I noticed that my girls would listen and at certain parts, would take flight. So I started a little musical play time. We renamed the piece "The Bunny Song" and I would move the furniture as far back as possible and we would begin the music as different forest animals waking up to start the day, acting out, hopping, galloping, jumping, hiding, chasing, eating, nesting and dancing through the piece until we had completed our little animal day nearly a half hour later. And then we all took a nap. If ever the girls were bored I would say "Let's play the Bunny Song" and they would cheer and assume their little animal roles, such as they were.
Alternately, I tried to enlighten them to the thrill of great musical theatre scores. I remember lifting each one of them, in turn, on to my hip and polka-ing up and down the hallway to "Shall We Dance" from the King and I. I remember their faces clearly - mouths fully open with exhilaration, heads thrown back at each turn, eyes lit up. No sooner would I put one down than the other two were climbing my legs to be next. And I kept this up until I nearly plotzed. I sung them to sleep every night with a slightly altered version of "Soliloquy" from Carousel ("But my little girls get hungry every night and they come home to me..."). They learned all the words and would sing it with me at bedtime and I loved the fact that they were learning to love this music.
Except the didn't learn to to love it. In fact, it bores them senseless and in fact, it is awful enough to them that they will leave the room, if not the house, to avoid it.
It occurs to me right now that I used to play music constantly. A friend of mine even remarked on it stating that he never knew a time that he came over that I didn't have the stereo on. I had scores and scores of my favorite music - usually classical or show tunes with a couple of jazz artists (Cleo Laine anyone?) and pop stars (the eternally sexy Sting). I even had some scratchy old 78s - like Eartha Kitt from the 50s (my mom's) and Russ Columbo from the 1930s (my grandmother's)! But I played them all the time. I rarely listen to music anymore because the kind of music that took over my house is very unappealing to me.
This weekend, my now grown daughters and their friends are all spending a bloody fortune to go to something called the Coachella Music Concert - an annual pilgrimage they make to listen to an endless stream of bands that are clones of one another with singers droning on with under-developed voices, singing of how everything is sad or how everything sucks or sex and love to the same three chords forever and ever amen. Or to rap singers who, with the familiar rythyms and universally-impossibile-to-understand raps, spill out phrases in monotone, on and on - about women who are b-itches or for a change of pace, about all the money they made rapping about women who are b-itches.
And I. Do not. Get. It. At all. But I was a good mommy for trying.
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