Not Just Another Pretty Voice

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've seen and heard all about Susan Boyle, the frumpy-looking 47-year-old woman whose singing knocked the socks off of the panel members on Britain's Got Talent. If you have been living under that rock, then you absolutely have to watch the YouTube video before you read another word.

And by the way, the term "frumpy-looking" modifies "47-year-old." They don't necessarily go together. My wife will be 47 in November, and is still a major league babe. In fact, I know a few 55-year-olds who are major babes. On the other hand, I know 20-somethings who are frumpy-looking.

But getting back to the main point, let's say it now and get it over with. She won because we didn't expect that voice to come out of that face and body. But what would've happened had she been "a looker?"

A friend of mine who's a music teacher said that Boyle has nice enough voice, but not necessarily better than any of the hundreds of kids she's had in her high school chorus over the past 10 years.

And she's right. Pretty voices are a dime a dozen. Some attractive 20 or 30-something, dressed nicely, and singing the exact same piece with the exact same voice, might not have even gotten a raised eyebrow from the panel. You expect people who you figure are right out of music school to be that good. But Susan Boyle had the perfect setup to make her stand out: the beautiful voice in the body of a frumpy-looking middle-aged woman. And it's exactly because of this setup that everyone is so amazed, and wishes her success.

Perhaps it's our perception of this "never been kissed" youngest of nine children, who stayed at home to take care of her ailing mother that has us rooting for her so much. To our minds, she never had a chance to get out there when she was younger, so let's give her the big one now. On the other hand, all those 20 and 30-somethings who are beating the pavement trying to get auditions and agents are still young yet, and have had plenty of other stuff in their lives (like boyfriends and girlfriends), so who really cares about them.

After seeing this video, one person wrote that he was "weeping over the years of wasted talent." That got me thinking about the millions of other people out there with beautiful voices who are living ordinary lives as doctors, teachers, pastors, steamfitters, whatever. People who maybe had their moment in the sun in their college choir, or who do community theater. Is this talent wasted because it never reaches millions? My friend Lonnie had a gorgeous voice, but rather than pursuing a career in music, is finishing up a doctorate in Nursing. Is her talent wasted? I don't think so, and I don't think that Susan Boyle's talent was wasted all these years by being shared only with people in her small town.

But we love a good Cinderella story, and Susan Boyle gave us one: the ugly duckling whose beautiful voice got her invited to the ball. And yet, as I've said many times already, it's worth noting that it's precisely because she's an "ugly duckling" that her voice was noticed.

Oh, and by the way, I can sing, and I'm 52. Does anyone want to invite me to the ball, even though I'm relatively good-looking?

Like A Kidney Stone

SPOILER ALERT: If you've never seen The Dead Poet's Society, and don't want the ending given away, skip this post until you've seen it. If you don't care about having a 20-year-old movie "ruined" for you, then go right on ahead.

Toward the end of The Dead Poet's Society, feeling that he can't escape the life planned out for him by his parents, Neil Perry commits suicide by shooting himself. The moment the sound of the gunshot is heard, most likely every person in the audience held his parents responsible, feeling that they just didn't get it.

I felt that way too, but there was someone else who I thought didn't get it - Neil. He, tragically, didn't get something that I understood from grade school: This too shall pass. Like a kidney stone, but it will pass.

This is what I thought all those times I was being bullied by Robert, John, Levi, or any of a number of bigger or stronger kids when I was in grade school. Somehow, I was able to step outside of myself, and look at the situation as a third party, thinking that in a few years they would "grow out of" their need to beat people up, and look back at how they treated me with shame.

This is what I thought when I was made fun of by the other kids, and none of the girls I was interested in would go out with me in high school. Again, somehow I was able to step outside of myself and say that in a few years they'd realize that the guy who wasn't cool enough and was way too geeky, was actually the better catch.

And this is what I thought as I chafed against some of the rules I didn't like from my parents. Even as far back as age 12, I took the long view, thinking "They may not let me do this now, but in six years, I can do whatever I want."

I was patient. With the bullies, with the girls, and with the rules. And I was right. Eventually the guys who were always waiting for me at the corner of Clinton Street and Melmore Gardens grew up and became productive citizens. Eventually the girls who thought I was too much of a dork married guys who were like me and wanted their kids to be like me. And eventually I moved out of my parents' house and didn't have to follow their rules anymore. I have to admit, however, that by the time this last thing happened, I didn't really care about flaunting most of those rules.

Neil didn't get it. He didn't get that he just had to wait it out another year or so, and then walk, to the consternation of his overly controlling parents. Instead, he gave himself a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

I teach grades 6 through 12, and middle school is a very ugly time for kids. High school isn't much better. With everyone trying to figure out where they fall in the social pecking order, they can be incredibly mean to each other. I wouldn't go back there for all the money in the world - unless I could take my 52-year-old brain with me, and then I'd be dangerous.

But there's one thing I want all of my students to know: that despite the horrible ways their classmates might treat them, and despite how limiting the rules of their parents may seem, this too shall pass. Like a kidney stone, but it'll pass.

It's really too bad that Neil didn't understand that, because once he got past that stone, he would've been a stronger person for it. I'd like to think that I am.

Oh, and while I'm ruining old movies for you, Rosebud is the sled.

A Most Perfect Hunchback

When I was in grade school, my mother gave me a set of books that have to have had an effect on the warped sense of humor I have now. Sick Jokes, More Sick Jokes, and Still More Sick Jokes had both my sister and I laughing hysterically, and I have to admit that thanks to those books I still love a good "Helen Keller" joke.

In fact, I was telling Helen Keller jokes as I was wheeled in for my own eye surgery over 30 years ago. I figured that if I couldn't tell the jokes then, then I had no right to ever tell them at all.

But aside from the many Helen Keller and "Sheldon" jokes, one other joke stuck in my mind for years. It's the one about the preacher and the hunchback:

The Sunday gospel-shouter was in great form.

"Everything God made is perfect," he preached.

A hunchback rose the rear of the auditorium. "What about me?"

"Why," said the preacher, "you're the most perfect hunchback I ever saw!"

In that joke is a bit of truth about how some (but not all) Christians look at certain types of deformities and abnormalities. Unable to reconcile their beliefs that everything God does is perfect with the obvious imperfections some people have, they come up with convoluted logic like that of the preacher in that joke.

And this brings me to "Terry."

Now, to be fair, most Christians do accept the fact that some people are born with deformities and abnormalities that need to be addressed. That's why there are so many church-related hospitals in this country, and why there are so many missionary hospitals in other countries. And had Terry been born with a cleft palate, a heart defect, or one leg shorter than the other, he could've not only found help at one of these hospitals, but support from the many congregations that support them. In those cases they could accept the fact that sometimes God would let mistakes happen. But that wasn't Terry's defect.

Terry said that he was born the wrong sex, and wanted to have surgery to become Terri.

From the time when he was a child Terry felt that something was wrong, and that he was supposed to be a girl. He sat on this and fought it for 30 or 40 years, and then decided to do something about it, to fix what to him seemed like obvious mistake. But even almost 50 years after George Jorgensen made news with the surgeries that turned him into Christine, there was still a lot of resistance to the idea of sex reassignment surgery, particularly among Christians.

People who would never have told someone with a heart defect that the problem was "all in their mind" and that they should get counseling and pray about it, were saying exactly that to Terry. Yet, what is easier to change, the function of a brain or the physical structure of the body? I'm no biologist, and I don't play one on TV either, but as we learn more about the effects of hormones on all parts of the developing fetus, including the brain, it becomes clear that sometimes things don't always go right, mismatching brain and physical sexual assignment.

Despite this, there are still people out there who are effectively saying that Terry is "the most perfect hunchback they've ever seen."

I haven't seen Terry in about 10 years, but I'm hoping - and praying - that she's not a hunchback any longer.

Flippin' Words

I was originally going to write this week about the words we use for sexual organs and activities, but since I owe Gina Chen over at the Syracuse Post-Standard a plug for her Family Life blog in return for the one she gave me this past week, I think I'll delay that discussion a bit. But I do still want to talk about words. In this case it's substitute words.

I've been thinking about this ever since I got in trouble for sending a post card home from Camp Ken-Etiwa-Pec in northwestern New Jersey, complaining about the food there. It wasn't the complaint that was the problem, after all, everyone complains about camp food, it was the way I did it. Thinking I was being witty with the camp's initials, the card I sent home said:

K-E-P stands for Krappy Eating Place.

My mother let me know, when I got home, that she wasn't happy with that, because "krap" (or "crap" as it's usually spelled) meant the "s-word."

This immediately got me to wondering. After all, there were a lot of words that meant the same thing as the "s-word;" from the scientific "feces" to the juvenile "doo-doo." I later found out that the Yiddish "dreck" is another term for that, and "bupkis," which most of us translate as "nothing" or "less than nothing" literally means "goat excrement." I wondered where the line was between which words were acceptable and which ones weren't, but was smart enough not to ask my mother that question. At least not at that particular moment.

But I've wondered about this, and other words, for years. Actually, I've wondered about what I call the substitute words, especially coming from kids. We have no problem when a kid says "darn" or "drat," even though, whether they know it or not, we adults know that those words are "polite" substitutes for the stronger "damn." Same thing with "heck." Even though we know it's a substitute for "hell," we tend not to give kids grief over saying it - especially since you can almost imagine Sheriff Andy Taylor saying "Aw heck, Barney, I told you to keep that bullet in your pocket."

And speaking of Barney and his bullet, I often heard my mother use the word "shoot" when she was frustrated. It was a few years after the postcard incident that I realized that that was another substitute word. Hmm...

But for some reason, despite the fact that we all use substitute words, a lot of us are still uncomfortable with kids saying "crap" as a substitute for the "s-word" and even more uncomfortable with "freaking" or "flipping" as substitutes for the "f-word."

But gosh darn it, "flipping" has a long and respectable history of use from the comic strip Andy Capp, which I read as a kid. So there's no freaking way I'll give any kid grief for saying that.

But shouldn't they be able to express themselves better, without having to resort to these words? I don't know. I think that we all need them at times. We all need words that are escape valves for our frustration. Why shouldn't kids have some too? And sometimes expressing yourself in a "better" way still alludes to the original term that we were all trying to avoid. For example, when I tell someone that I think they need a laxative, a smart person will realize that I'm saying that they're full of...crap.

Well, shoot, I say it's time to cut the crap and let 'em have their freaking substitutes!

Saluting Mr D

I remember, back in 8th grade, the day Mr D sat on his desk and said, "Today we're going to talk about grammar. And speaking of my grandmother..." This launched him into a set of stories about growing up in North Jersey back when there were farms in parts of East Orange and Newark (Incredible, isn't it?), and about how a nice Catholic boy by the name of Louis D'Antonio ended up at Upsala College, which was a Lutheran school.

I can't recall if we diagrammed a single sentence that day, or even that year, but I do know that the 28 of us in his homeroom hung onto every word of his stories.

Yes, I had Mr D for homeroom, as well as 8th grade English, and that meant that my group was doubly blessed, because we got twice as much of him as the other 8th-graders, and more of his stories about just about everything. And as I said, he was a great storyteller.

I have never read Hamlet, and feel no need to, because Mr D told us the story one day in class. He did such a great job of telling it that when I first saw The Lion King, I recognized it for what it was, right down to Timon and Pumbaa playing the parts of Rosencranz and Guildenstern. And that story about the guy who turns into a cockroach - Mr D told us that one too, and had us sitting at the edge of our seats. Four years later when in a Spiderman story arc, Peter Parker sprouts four new arms and says that he feels like a character out of Kafka, I knew exactly what he was talking about.

The gavel. I almost forgot about the gavel. Mr D had a gavel on his desk that he used whenever he wanted us to be quiet and pay attention. One day he hit the gavel so hard that it broke. That got our attention.

He probably didn't know that he introduced a whole group of 8th graders to one of the rising stars of pop music. That was on the class trip he arranged into New York to see the off-Broadway play The Drunkard in Greenwich Village. The orchestra for this 19th century style melodrama was one guy, with curly blond hair, sitting at the piano, reading The Godfather between songs. Years later, I found out that this pianist, who we practically blew off his piano stool with an unscheduled "Oomph" during the sing-along of For Me and My Gal, was the same guy who eventually brought us Mandy, and who didn't write I Write the Songs. Yes, that was Barry Manilow.

It was Mr D who explained to us in class the next day what a gay bar was, when it turned out that one of the groups of students - all guys in this case - who had been set loose to find their own dinner in the Village on that trip, just happened to walk into one; and he even turned that explanation into a great story.

Did I mention the game of Stump Mr D? Once a week we'd get out our dictionaries and try to find a word he didn't know the definition of. We couldn't do it. He knew the definitions of even what we thought were the most obscure words - and then we learned them too.

Well, you probably knew from the start where this was going. I received word the other day that Mr D passed away last month, far too soon, at the age of 72.

I may not have learned how to diagram a sentence in his class, but I hope I learned how to tell a story at least half as well as he did.

And I'm thinking that maybe I should buy a gavel so I can get a little better control of my own classroom.

When Late Is Right On Time

My wife and I often joke about how many times the Social Skills Fairy let me down when I was in high school and college. But maybe, just maybe, she knew what she was doing all along.

Let's start with my senior prom. I had to go to it. No really. I had to. I was the class president, so I had to go to the prom. The problem here was going to be getting a date. Despite the fact that I was class president, I wasn't one of the popular kids, and girls weren't exactly beating down the doors to go out with me. Quite the contrary, they often ran the other way when they saw me coming.

I did get a date though. I asked "Jean," a girl I had dated on and off earlier in the year. We were now in one of our "off" phases, but I figured that she'd go with me if I asked. I was right.

Then, 15 minutes later, "Bonnie," a girl I'd had a crush on since 9th grade, but figured was unattainable, came up to me and asked if I had a date to the prom yet.

Where was this girl 20 minutes earlier?

I told her that I already had a date, and went to the prom with Jean as planned.

20 years later the Social Skills Fairy came knocking on my door, saying, "Keith, you did the honorable thing by going to the prom with Jean anyway, but you could've asked Bonnie out for some other time."

Duh!

And this wasn't the only time the Social Skills Fairy failed me by arriving too late to do me any good. I think of the time, in college, that I walked my good friend "Sarah" home in a really bad snowstorm, and she said that I really didn't have to go home in that weather, that I was welcome to stay at her apartment. I assured her that I could make it the 3/4 of a mile to my house, and went on my way.

10 years later there's a knock on my door. It's the Social Skills Fairy again, suggesting that maybe that wasn't just a friendly offer to come in out of the snow.

Duh!

There have been many other times when the Social Skills Fairy failed me by showing up too late to do me any good. But I'll spare you, and myself, the painful details of romantic opportunities missed because the Social Skills Fairy was busy somewhere else. What might have happened had the fairy been there when I needed her?

Well, for one thing, things might have worked out. With Bonnie, with Sarah, with Emily, and a number of other girls I was too stupid to catch the hint about or know what to do with. And that would've been a bad thing.

A bad thing? How could it possibly have been a bad thing? Well there's a common theme in science fiction about how one little change in the past can have huge implications for the future. Forget science fiction, take a look at It's A Wonderful Life, and how things would've turned out in Bedford Falls had George never been born. Had things worked out for me with any of the girls I just mentioned, even temporarily, it might have changed things drastically for all of us - and the rest of the world.

It's funny. The Social Skills Fairy arrived right about the time that I met my wife, Cheryl. And all those things she told me about Bonnie, Sarah, Emily, and all the others, she told me long after Cheryl and I were married and had kids. Kids that we might not have had, had she arrived with her advice earlier.

I guess that by arriving what I often think of as "late," she arrived right on time.

Thank You McDonald's

A lot of people have a lot of bad things to say about McDonald's, especially after Morgan Spurlock's 2004 movie Supersize Me. I have a few criticisms along those lines too, and plenty for Spurlock, but that's not what this is about.

I've come to praise McDonald's, not to bury it.

Because McDonald's helped to make me what I am today.

It says in the Bible that a prophet has no honor in his hometown, and while I definitely never saw myself as a prophet, I understand what this saying is getting at: the people who think they've known you all of your life will never let you change, and will ask you who you think you're trying to be when you do something different from what they expect of you. This was the case with me in high school. Academically I was near the top, but socially Rodney Dangerfield was getting more respect than me.

That changed when I got a job at McDonald's. You see, while I lived and went to school in East Orange, McDonald's was in West Orange. As a result, this change of venue introduced me to people who didn't know me, and had no preconceived ideas of what I acted like. It was great. I was able to re-invent myself without anyone mocking me for "trying to be something that I wasn't." To them, the West Orange Keith was the real Keith, and I gained a great deal of self-confidence and several life-long friends as a result of working at the Golden Arches.

But the self-confidence wasn't just about the social skills. It was also about learning skills that would help me outside of McDonald's. One of those was the value of a job well done the first time. At home my parents would just yell at me for a poorly done job, but at McDonald's they could fire me, and I didn't want that.

Another was the value of teamwork. I was not an athletic kid, so the only team I was on at East Orange High School was the math team. But at McDonald's I was a valued part of a team because I could "play any position" and play with anyone. I could do fries, work register, make shakes, manage the bin, run the grill; you name it, I could do it. They could put me anywhere someone was needed, and because of that, I got a lot of hours. And, of course, being that valued team member meant that everyone respected me. What a great feeling that was!

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from my time at McDonald's is how to treat service people. Having been the register person who got yelled at by a customer for something that was beyond my control, I am absolutely patient and understanding with waitresses, cashiers, and other front line service people. With that in mind, I think that everyone should have to spend a few weeks running a fast food cash register.

McDonald's was an excellent apprenticeship for all the other things I would do in my life, and that's a very important word to consider. In an age where people are fighting for McDonald's employees to make enough money to support their families, it's important to consider that a fast food job is not supposed to be something you spend the rest of your life doing. It's a low-paid apprenticeship that you're supposed to be able to graduate from to something better.

I served my apprenticeship from 1972 to 1977.

Thanks, Ronald!