The Aerie
I'm freezing!
We're sitting here at the piano teacher's house, and I've apparently
found the Cold Corner. Across the room my kids are starting to nod off
at the piano due to being too warm, but I'm sitting here with my toes
numb.
The cat keeps on trying to strike up a deal: he'll warm my lap, in
return for being allowed to pierce my thighs with needle-sharp claws
whenever he pleases. I actually took the deal for a while, but I
realized that my laptop will do the lap-warming thing without spotting
my slacks with blood. So I figured I'd dash off an entry in My
neglected journal.
So two kids' pianodown, one to go. The teacher is planning on leaving
for "a gig" immediately after this lesson, and now her bandmates are
rolling amps and speakers out the door. The open door. To the outside.
My blood is starting to gel in my toes, and my knuckles creak when I
type. I figure if I wasn't typing, I might just solidify.
But this is the GOOD piano teacher, so it's worth it. She's our third.
The first I got off our cafe bulletin board, and she was nice because
she came to the house -- which was an immense plus with the young
twins and an infant we had at the time. But she taught only the very
basics: hit the keys, kids. And she had no interest in recitals. But
after a few years the kids still couldn't read music.
So we switched to a woman from church, but she was from Edina. From no
recitals, piano lessons turned into ALL recitals. Now, I'm of the
pragmatic school of recitals, myself -- they're good for occasionally
focusing the kids attention on their work. But we found ourselves
going to recitals every other week: at the MacPhail school of music,
at a church, etc., dressed in our best clothes.
At the MacPhail recital the kids performed on a little stage. They had
been required to build dioramas depicting their songs, and these were
scattered around the room. People wore furs. It was all about acting
snooty and putting on airs than the music. I hated it.
Then we hooked up with the latest. She lives in a small, (somewhat
chilly) inner city home, and you can tell at a glance that music is
her life. The living room is dominated by a well-used upright piano,
and unlike ours is not competing for space with a television
entertainment center. There are maracas on the cluttered bookshelves,
a painting of a keyboard, amps and speakers on a rolling cart, a
guitar in a case in a corner, and even the decorative knickknack on
the wall is a tiny working two-stringed musical plunker.
She's very patient with our youngest, and very calm even when it's
evident that the kids haven't attended to all their lessons. She's
affable but firm when it comes to teaching. Really quite a lucky find.
I remember the ambiance of the Edina teacher, with her spit-and-polish
recitals and air of snootiness, and I much prefer having the kids
learn from a woman who simply plays around the cat when it jumps up on
the piano bench.
Tonight after lessons and dinner the twins are going to be staying at
the park building a block from our home. While I'm happy to see our
family getting some use of the park (don't get me started on our lousy
park), I'm a bit leery of the event itself. They're going to be
playing in a LARP.
LARP stands for Live-Action Role Playing, game, or as I once would
have put it, "playing pretend." Apparently one of the fellows who runs
the park's after-school program is a Dungeon Master, and the kids have
spent several afternoons as elves and dwarves and what-have-you (or
what-are-you?), and that's all well and good. But now they're going to
be in this building with this Dungeon Master, overnighT, and I have to
confess I've got a little anxiety.
It's a shame, too. I mean, it should just be a nice little event, the
kids can go have some fun. Instead I'm worried about gropers and
perverts and such rude nonsense. So I'll be heading over there
beforehand to scope the place out and pretend I gather some idea of
who these people are who are going to be with my kids. But in the end
it comes down to crossing my fingers.
I had never heard of LARPs until I found myself writing and running
one three hours after arriving at the U-Con roleplaying convention
back in 1999. But at least I've had five years of writing and playing
in LARPs to suggest that the kids should have a good time tonight.
Meanwhile, my own LARP participation is a week away: on Thursday
morning we hit the road for Ann Arbor Michigan and the U-Con
convention. I've still got to write up the game that I'll be running
there. I've winged it in the past, but mostly when running a game in
concert with my friend Joe. I'll not only be running this game myself,
but I'll be running it twice, back to back. So I figure maybe I'll try
to give it a bit more structure, and maybe make it so that it runs as
a continuous game across both sessions, just in case anyone stays for
both games.
Of course, I'll have 12 hours in a car with two other Tekumel gamers
to really polish it up. But the kids want to help me test it too, so
hopefully I'll have some time to work on it tonight and tomorrow, and
run it for a bit on Sunday. However, I could wing the entire thing and
it would go, if not "well", then at least allright. I wouldn't need to
freak out in advance. Not like when I ran the LARP in 2000 and really
stressed out! Heh.
[1]Last
Posted by Albatross at November 7, 2003 12:00 AM