Take the Cannoli Read Free Page B

orchestra. I played the bass drum in orchestra, which meant that I never got to play. My participation ratio was something like seventy-five measures of rest per one big bass wallop. This gave me plenty of time to contemplate the class warfare of the situation. Here’s what I figured out: Orchestra kids wear tuxedos. Band kids wear tuxedo T-shirts.
    The orchestra kids, with their brown woolens and Teutonic last names, had the well-scrubbed, dark blond aura of a Hitler Youth brigade. These were the sons and daughters of humanities professors. They took German. They played soccer. Dumping the fluorescent T-shirts of the band kids into the orchestra each week must have looked like tossing a handful of Skittles into a box of Swiss chocolates.
    But nothing brings kids together like hate. The one thing the band kids and the orchestra kids had in common was a unified disgust for the chorus kids, who were, to us, merely drama geeks with access to four-part harmony. A shy violin player wasn’t likely to haunt the halls between classes playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik any more than a band kid would blare “Land of 1000 Dances” on his tuba more than three inches outside the band room door. But that didn’t stop the choir girls from making everyone temporarily forget their locker combinations thanks to an impromptu, uncalled-for burst from Brigadoon.
    Andy Heap: chorus.
ACCIDENTAL LESSON # 2: WHERE’S WALTER?
    My junior high had an electronic music lab. We made tape loops and learned words like “quadraphonic.” In my spare time, just for fun, I checked out all the books on electronic music from the library. My favorite records for a while there were Walter Carlos’s concept albums Switched-On Bach and its sequel, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, which offered what I thought were hilariously witty covers of Bach classics performed on (get this) a Moog synthesizer. What kind of madcap visionary was capable of turning eighteenth-century fugues into machine-age mongrels?
    In my readings on electronic music, something puzzled me. Every time I’d look into Walter Carlos, the information would just stop andsomeone named Wendy Carlos would turn up. I got to school early one morning to ask my electronic-music teacher what happened to Walter and was Wendy Walter’s wife or daughter? He didn’t answer for a long time. Then he blurted out, “Uh, Wendy is Walter.”
    What did he mean?
    â€œWalter had a sex change operation and changed his name to Wendy.”
    What’s a sex change operation? I had just started eighth grade. I knew absolutely nothing about sex. We didn’t talk about it in my family and sex ed wasn’t scheduled until spring. I was a wholesome, smalltown Christian kid engaged in what I thought were wholesome, smalltown Christian pursuits. It’s Bach for heaven’s sake. Suddenly, bam, I’m standing at the corner of Sodom and Gomorrah and where’s my street map?
    That Walter Carlos. I hadn’t even recovered from the shock that Bach could be messed with.
ACCIDENTAL LESSON # 3: BIOLOGY AS DESTINY
    In seventh grade, I started band. I wanted to play the drums. My parents, who lived with me—as was the custom in Montana—did not want me to play the drums. So I picked the next loudest instrument instead—the trumpet. How I loved my trumpet, the feel of it in my hands, its very volume and shine. I especially loved the illicitly named spit valve.
    In eighth grade, a teacher told me about this good old trumpet player I might like so I went out and bought one of his records. And every night, for over a year, I went to sleep listening to it, the same songs over and over, trying to figure out why Louis Armstrong was so moving, so funny, so good. I got caught up in this superstar talent of his right around the time I was beginning to suspect that I didn’t have it, talent that is.
    There was another problem which I discovered about three years into my