I got the best education a person could have, in my Western Pennsylvania home town, in the late 60’s. To have had a better education, I would have had to have lived elsewhere. Since I had no choice where I lived or the time when I lived there, without doubt it was the best education I could possibly have had.
Did I ever tell you I got thrown off the high school newspaper staff because I wrote and circulated an “underground” magazine and got caught doing so? Yes? OK, we’ll move on.
Speaking of the best education a person can have (or could have had, employing the past-perfect subjunctive), my best friend Bill was sent home from high school one day, I think it was a June day. Actually, maybe it was summer school, but does it really matter? He was sent home because he dared wear a V-neck top to school. Bill was a fashion plate, not a rebel. Bill fantasized about owning a clothing store or, better yet, doing clothing design. In one of our hour-long high-school phone chats, he made up the name for his store: “Wilson Blair”. Sounded impressive to me. Not impressive enough, apparently, for some sex-mindful teacher who found acute-angled necklines too suggestive, even where no cleavage was involved. (Who WAS this teacher? Was it Mrs. Pitzer? I wish Bill were around to remind me, and reminisce and joke about it over a suitable beverage.)
So, after having experienced the best high-school education I possibly could have had (even taking into account our back-to-back teacher-strike shortened spring semesters, where many weeks of the best education I could have possibly had were irretrievably lost), I applied to colleges like Harvard, Yale, MIT and C-MU.
Here is my visual memory of the Harvard interview, from background to foreground: picture-window overlooking the city, crisply-dressed man, large wooden and leather desk, a few feet of carpet, and me, in a chair, probably the smallest chair I ever sat in, maybe because I was the smallest I had ever been.
I never attended Harvard. This was OK because I didn’t belong, they knew it, and I knew it. I remember the interviewer asking me a question about civil rights. This was 1969. Now, while I could tell you who was on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on Sunday, my awareness of the civil rights struggle was woefully limited to scenes of fire hoses turned on marchers and rioters on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. (In our house, the only shows we watched were on CBS since Channel 2 had the strongest signal from 50 miles away). Western Pennsylvania in the 1960’s was probably one of the more racist regions in the country outside the Deep South (I say this retrospectively because I didn’t grasp it then). But of course, no one used the “R”-word at that time, in that place. Instead, what was going on was called “prejudice” and no one admitted to having it (or perhaps only a little bit of it, sort of like having a “mild cold”). I had it too, but it took me a while to know it and get over it.
So, after receiving the best possible education one could have in the 1960’s in a small town in Western Pennsylvania, I wound up going to C-MU in Pittsburgh, the same city where my wife-to-be was already attending college. (Odd how things turned out that way, yes?) My parents paid for the intellectual and social education of their too-sheltered son, without much oversight or intervention.
I find myself wishing I had taken more advantage of the learning opportunity that the university and my parents provided. But realistically, I didn’t have the maturity to absorb it. So now, when I can’t sleep at night, I log on to arxiv.org and read physics papers, hoping to get a better understanding of the universe and the forces that shape it. I’m not sure this is what my parents and teachers had in mind forty years ago, but this isn’t Western Pennsylvania any more, Dorothy.
I don’t want to sing along. I just want to listen. That’s why they call this The Audience.
That is how I would like to respond to being cajoled to sing along, or clap along or make some other kind of sound effect, when a performer wants to pad his or her stage time with one of those misguided audience-participation numbers. I didn’t come here to sing, I came to hear you sing. And I am not wowed by the sound of hundreds of fellow audience members singing in unison, we’ve all been there and done that, and it’s kum-bore-ya.
What set this off? Well, we were driving home from Raleigh last Saturday evening, and Prairie Home Companion came on the radio. Garrison had invited an opera singer (mezzo-soprano Susan Graham) to appear on the show. One song Susan selected was from the operetta “The Merry Widow”. For some reason, Susan thought it would be fun to have the show’s live audience sing this line from the chorus: “Haunting the woodland, enchanting the night.” Of course, the audience had never heard the song and had to be prompted in the usual manner, with Susan calling out the words just before they needed to be sung.
Nothing about this worked. First, this isn’t a phrase that particularly cries out for mass intonation. Second, the audience was there to hear the mezzo-soprano, not to compete with her. Third, the prompting absolutely destroyed the mood of the song. As I’m sure Susan Graham is a canny performer, I ask, why would she resort to this?
I wonder if it isn’t a bit lazy for a performer to enlist an audience in anything other than a magic act. If one’s performance is not compelling enough on its own, then liven it up, don’t pander to the audience for the sake of variety. Doing so may stave off boredom for the performer but it’s not clear to me what it does for the audience. It’s not like we are all fidgety four-year-olds with short attention spans who need to be “worked” by the performer lest we drift off and fail to appreciate his or her talent.
I would be interested to hear from others on the merits (or otherwise) of audience participation. In the meantime, please sing along with me… “Haunting the woodland…”