06-10-00
In fifth grade, like many of my kind, I joined band. I wanted to play some cool instrument, like the drums or the saxophone; the kind of instrument that people in real bands played. I ended up playing the flute, because a strange succession of people in my mother's life happened to conveniently have flutes we could borrow. I suffered the indignity of being a floutist until second semester, seventh grade. At this point and time, home economics had just come to an end, and occupational versatility [shop class, for the unenlightened] was set to begin.
I loved shop. I made many varied and useless holders of things, like a wooden whale-shaped pencil receptacle, and a strange, bent plexiglass bowl. I had a fun time doing it, and in eighth grade shop, I made the tool box instead of the tissue dispenser the rest of the girls made. Either way, it beat the fuck out of playing the flute.
What brings this up, you might ask? I just had occasion to view the film American Pie. Now, I was prepared to hate this movie, because I am not the biggest fan of slap-stick scatologically-referenced movies, but this film made me cackle gleefully. It made me happy, which we know is a good thing. Alyson Hannigan, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame starred as this delicious flute-playing band nerd nymphette, who almost made me spit a mouthful of water across the room and all over the screen of the television. Really, she had a bit part, but she stole the film away from the other actors. If you haven't seen the movie, I don't feel that I am revealing anything terrible in telling you that she reveals that at least half of band camp is sex education. Now, I never got lucky in band, nor in choir, for that matter. I did, however, get to somewhere between second and third base on a 23-hour bus ride, during the biennial band and choir spring break trip to the Big Apple, my sophomore year of high school. I touched his monkey, and he groped my chest.
Ah, sweet memories.
