Theme for the Week: Transparency

I will always be inspired by dresses.  The following story was inspired by a frock from this local designer: 



Transparency

           This mom--one of them--held up the thing that was to raise funds at the fundraiser.

    “That?” I said, because it was barely anything, but then she held it up to herself and it became something more..

“Consider this over what I’m wearing,” she said, and that was what the dad standing here and I did.  This mom wasn’t dressed for the party.  The dad and I were in jeans, both of us, but we looked better than she did with nothing extra over.  I didn’t need to buy a thing like that, even if it was for the kids.  

I wanted to tell the mom this:  no one would have noticed the thing in a different fabric, one that anyone could see, “which is why you--you know--you love it so much.” I wanted to say, and then I would lift my cup and toast her.

“I’ve never,” she said, “seen anything like this thing.”

Around us, parents were drinking.  This dad was drinking.  Alcohol had been smuggled into the school, and we parents, for once in our lives, were having fun.  Blocks our kids used during the week had been built into a bar.  Some parents tried to knock the block bar down. The parents that liked it weren’t sure if they should.  

“Nobody’s fault hers,” the bartender said, waving his glass at the principal.

           “Sshhh,” the principal had told all the parents in the planning committee meaning. “Pass it on.”

    On the clipboard in front of her, that mom wrote her name right down for the thing.  This was called “placing a bid.”  “I hope I get this thing,” the mom said, unable to unbunch it.  In her fist, all together like that, the thing almost became something the dad and I could get behind.

           “Don’t leave it alone,” I said.  “Stay with it.”

            I moved down among the other things that had been gathered from all over our city for the kids and this brick building in which they all kicked around in.  I wrote my name under some of the things.    

There are things about me I haven’t told anyone.

Sometimes I am mistaken for a man.  My handwriting.  My legs from the knees down.  

    My voice often gets so deep, I’ve learned to keep it low.

Because for a silent auction, everyone was being loud, and in the school cafeteria, there was a band, banding away.

            How could I be expected to concentrate on these things?           

How much could the kids be expected to handle if we didn’t?

Parents moved their plastic glasses to and fro under the low hanging fluorescent lights.  

The trouble we could get into.

    “I think I’m going to get it!” the mom called out from over there.

           Soon she would know for sure.

          At the block bar, the bartender switched out my last drink ticket for water.  I leaned over the bar, blocks tumbling, his shirt in my hands. "Just one more," I said.

excellence & equity

a follow-up to last night's post:

this seems like such a radical proposition.

why is that?

why has this part of the discussion receded so far into the back ground that it's become inaudible?

it's time to start talking a lot louder about equality in education again.  i don't think we can afford to drop it.

read the entire article here.

and here's a teaser:

"It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad."

curmudgeonly: quality education as a constitutional right

not a fan of the pop bottle parade.  though cecily's masquerade ball dancers turned out kinda cute after all.

julie, i get so crabby about school fundraisers!

maybe it's because i've been doing the silent auctions, the spaghetti dinners, the school carnivals for way, way too long.  maybe it's because i hated elementary school and felt shy and awkward there as a child.  and traumatized.  and i hate it still.

tomorrow is my kids' fall festival, and the only upside is how much they love it.  otherwise, for me, it's the worst.  just for starters, they replaced the cake walk, where kids decorated cakes for the carnival, with decorated pop bottles.  this hearkens back a few years to when the state banned homemade food in the schools, only allowing packaged, commercially prepared foods at school events.  i.e. high fructose corn syrup in plastic.  i despise soda for so many reasons, not the least of which is the hideous aesthetic properties of the pop bottle parade.

(my older kids staged a protest that year just outside the bounds of the school fair and handed out buttons reading "let them eat cake" and asked people to sign a cutely worded petition about bringing back the cake walk.  it was a beautifully enacted civil protest until the pta president swore at them and the school custodian kicked their siblings out of the carnival.  we specialize in pissing people off around here.)

and here's more material for my worst mother of the year nomination:  i also despise volunteering at my kids' schools, or setting foot in them at all.  hate it.  loathe it.  it makes me anxious, sweaty, and depressed.  i'll save the psychoanalysis of why for some other time.

what i really want to bitch about is school fundraisers, and just pose a few questions:

1)  why does it make sense to spend hours getting donations from local businesses, hours setting up tables, auctioning systems, collecting and cashing checks and tabulating sales?  this seems like the most inefficient way possible to raise money.

2) why are we burdening the "stay at home parents (mostly moms)" with all this extra work?  or worse, the moms with part-time, flexible, or full-time jobs with this extra work?

3) why is it fair that some public schools can raise 200K at their school fair, and some can't muster the resources to have any sort of fundraiser?  how does this provide an equal education for all children?

for the love of all that's holy.

please raise my taxes.   please let me pay more for my own kids and other people's kids education.  from now until i'm dead.

please let us all pay a little more for our public schools and then distribute it equally amongst the rich and poor neighborhoods.

it makes no sense to me for us to spend our time when we could more easily and efficiently spend our money to strengthen all of our schools rather than just the ones in neighborhoods where families have disposable time and money to spend on their own little microcosm of education.

and please

save me from the hell of another fall carnival.

thank you for listening.

p.s. read about the algebra project, one of the coolest things going in the u.s. towards increasing equality in public schools, and founded by bob moses, civil rights hero and macarthur fellow.

Debbie Harry Wore Forearm Tights

Do you see them? Her forearm tights?  Are they fabric or leather?  My camera phone photos truly do suck, but I think they're fabric, shiny like the gored skirt she wore at an age-appropriate length. (Bare legs and sandals!)  It's sad that we no longer have the iconic 30-something Debbie to ogle over (as pretty as a china doll), but the 60-something Debbie is aging well, commands the stage with an earthiness she didn't have before, and still sounds amazing.

For the third year (not in a row), she performed with my kid's school bands: middle and high, for a sorely needed fundraiser that was held this past Thursday night at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square. I was all set to sneer--as I can't stand being in a chain restaurant, but the space was beautiful, in the old Paramount Theatre and featured curated memorabilia from John Bonham, Lynard Skynard, Alice Cooper, the Beatles, Courtney Love(!), Elvis, etc etc.

Those of you who have seen my Facebook saw a video of Debbie perform "One Way or Another" in a strangely incongruous, yet mind-blowing  juxtaposition with the middle school band, children in the throes of adolescence.  I can't tell you how much it moved me.  She was so gracious and generous with them, treated them like professionals--musicians who deserved to be on that stage with her.  And it's always an amazing to see a veteran performer do their thing live.

With the high school band, she performed (in addition to the jazz standard "Stormy Weather")  "Rapture" and "The Tide is High"--this song concluded with her leading the teen musicians off the stage to snake around the audience.   It actually kind of . . . breathtaking.  For an encore, she let the kids be center stage and joined (sporting a black fedora) the small group of high school girls for some back-up singing.

This event was also kind of--dare I say?--emotional for me, because one of my first exposures to Debbie Harry's band, Blondie, was at a miserable job I had the summer before my senior year in high school.  I worked at a dry cleaners alongside an emotionally abusive marine wife, who had an angrily chopped short haircut and red-rimmed eyes as if she always had just been crying.  I realized later that her life had been probably even more miserable than mine.  What got me through was the cleaner's little radio, and that summer, Blondie's music--Debbie Harry's voice always seemed to be streaming from it.  (That--and the recently murdered John Lennon's, whose Double Fantasy record was still in heavy rotation.)  Growing up poor in a low desert town near the Mexican border, I could never have imagined, when I couldn't even imagine New York, that someday I would be seeing her so up close and in the middle of Manhattan helping to raise some dough for the benefit of my kid's school.

(I just found out that the event netted $18,000, which will be swallowed up quickly I'm sure.)

Debbie with our beatnik school music teacher, Roy Nathanson

Debbie with teacher Sean Sodderegger, directing the middle school band

Debbie with her awesome forearm tights and one Jazz Passenger sitting in on green trombone.