Who Never Learned to Sing

Tonight, at a small brick-and-mortar music store (the last of a dying breed) in my neighborhood, it will be a game of "Spot the Faker" for bemused citizens sitting in folding chairs as the principals in a local production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe will sing selections from the operetta as part of a First Friday event.

(Hint: I'm the faker. The tall, skinny one with the glasses and the airplane hangar-proportioned proboscis.)

See, I never learned to sing. Strangely enough, in middle school, you could find me in the chorus. Stranger still, in high school, I was in musicals. But the weirdness didn't reach its height until two years after college ended, when I auditioned for my first Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, and audition committee heads turned to each other in stupification as I crisply and excitedly sang "When I Was a Lad," the patter song from H.M.S. Pinafore, (a song I had been singing in the shower for years) memorized, with silly little homespun choreography.

And here we are, six years later, seven operettas later. One more under the belt. They only wrote fourteen together, as all particularly proper 'peretta pedants know.

Yeomen of the Guard
Patience
H.M.S. Pinafore
Ruddigore
Pirates of Penzance
The Sorcerer
Iolanthe

I'm halfway home.

And I'm as scared to death as ever, because I never learned to sing.

I barely learned how to read music. When I was in first grade, our overweight and impossibly coiffed and painted music teacher did a note recognition exercise with us. If she held up a drawing of a quarter note, you got down on your knees. A rest, you sat down, Indian-Style. A whole note, you stood up with arms outstretched, and so on. As we got better at recognizing the funny symbols, my music teacher sped up the game, frantically holding up one card, then another, all of us sitting and standing like it was some sort of crystal meth-infused, gleeful church service for kids. The glee came to an abrupt halt when my ankle snapped after we were shown a rest and I sat down too quickly, and too awkwardly.

And so I became the first child to break his ankle in music class. Of course.

It's a cute story, sure, though it was embarrassing for a while, especially during the b'pimpled era, but I think it speaks rather uncomfortable volumes about my relationship with music, but specifically singing. I never quite stood up straight again, and I don't mean that literally, although I do have scoliosis, as is required by Jewish law. When I sing before an audience, there is always something being held back, there is always a reticence, something that is not quite sure it's supposed to come out, or wants to. And so I hide behind the comic G&S roles-- those funny, silly patter roles that were never written for operatic singers, real singers. They're written for a "comic actor who can sing," in the words of Sullivan himself, as opposed to the more lyric roles for the romantic leads and the heavies, people who must sing first, and act second.

And I hide pretty well, even though, at least in my own mind, I out myself every time I open my mouth. Although, to be honest, there's always a piece of me that's waiting for my other ankle to snap out from under me every time I sing and prance about a stage.

It's a shame, really, because I never get to enjoy what I do. Never. It's also a shame because I think my continued participation in these shows, the portrayal of characters traditionally inhabited by seasoned, veteran, trained performers, smacks a little bit of disrespect for the material I love so much-- the joyous and jocular, sonorous and sweet, precious and precocious material of two obstinate Victorian gentlemen who should have been sainted-- not just knighted-- just for staying together as long as they did. But I mean no disrespect, Sir William & Sir Arthur. Like an altar boy, I just want to celebrate you through the only means you handed down to me. And I've been lucky enough not to be found out yet.

Shhh-- don't tell. Anyway, no time for that now. As Gilbert said, "I have a song to sing, O."

If I Drank...

Most of you know, I think, that I am a teetotaler. It's not especially something that I wear upon my sleeve (well, except when I'm writing about it, or indignantly refusing an offer of alcohol by saying, with nose gallantly upturned, "Well, I don't drink!") but, at 30 years old, it does come up quite a bit. Like, at rehearsal last week, when one of the choristers was turning 21 and excitedly approached me to ask for my input on what ought to be her "first legal drink?"

"Um..." I hemmed, searching through the dusty card catalog in my brain that contained references to alcoholic drinks I have heard in movies, television shows, and in eavesdropped conversations with others who libate, "a Cosmopolitan?"

A woman with whom I worked ten years ago used to drink Cosmopolitans, and she introduced mention of this drink into almost every conversation we had, so it's understandable that it's the first "drink concoction" that would leap into my brain. This woman also told me, with great enthusiasm, that she enjoyed pleasuring herself to the sounds of Frank Sinatra's "My Way" whilst utilizing a battery powered device she referred to as "The Bullfrog."

I sometimes think about what I'd be like if I drank. I'd certainly be less, well, unique, and I suspect that's not an altogether small part of why I consistently abstain, because it's now a part of my personality, one of the bits-and-pieces that makes me me. Haha-- that looks funny-- "me me."

ME ME ME ME! LA LA LA LA! YOU YOU YOU YOU! FA SO LA TI DO!

Which brings me quite handsomely to my second thought about me knocking back a few: I suspect that my already dubious sense of humor would probably take a rather suicidal nosedive. Funny people (I'm funny, right?) who don't drink have to go through their lives being routinely accosted by drinkers who believe that we will "be so much fuckin' funnier drunk" and are often told, "Oh, man, I would LOVE to see you drunk! You'd be SO. FUNNY!" Well, I'm not so sure about that. I had always thought that humor was the result of carefully-constructed word-choices and/or unwitting sock + trouser combinations, and I don't know if I could muster the synaptic control to be funny if I were intoxicated. I would most likely be way too encumbered by feelings of guilt and obsessive fears that I could hear my liver changing shape inside me to be very witty.

Of course, nobody really knows what a non-drinker would be like as a drinker. Being a world-renowned featherweight, I suspect the first and most consistent thing I would be is passed the fuck out. That said, it is very possible that I would enjoy drinking if that is the usual result for someone my weight. I do love being seepie-bye.

What I can say with pretty cinder-block-like certainty is that, if I started drinking....

* I would pee everywhere.

Because alcohol lowers your inhibitions, your respect for law, order, civility, and public spaces, and increases your urge to urinate, I would totally whizz on your garden gnome's face.

* I would get arrested.

See above.

* I would not hit the Four Loko.

Not just because it's dangerous, expensive, trendy, and just fucking stupid, but because watermelon-flavored things never, EVER taste like actual watermelon.

* I would only drink drinks that require the obligatory donning of a smoking jacket.

Because, really, that would be, like, my goddamned alcoholic's uniform.

What's yours?

* I would go absolutely shitbroke buying all the high-quality paraphernalia.

Do you have any concept of just how much there is to BUY when you're a drinker?

And I LOVE to buy things!

If you're an insufferable fop, there's hand-engraved sterling hip flasks and delicate, cut-glass punch-bowl sets from the Victorian era, if you're an acne-ridden, knuckle-walking frat bra, there's beer towers with ice chambers and inflatable beer pong racks (yes, I looked this up: http://www.drinkinginovations.com/) and, if you're just a run-of-the-mill, semi-well-off middle-aged schmuck in the suburbs, there's a whole section of "Crate & Barrel's" website devoted to alcoholiania. Do you doubt me? Here's the subset of menu options stemming from "DRINKWARE":

Wine glasses
Champagne flutes
Beer & drinking glasses
Margarita glasses
Cordial glasses
Acrylic glasses (What, we're drinking acrylic now? Four Loko's got competition...)
Bar accessories
Pitchers and decanters ...and, finally and mysteriously,
Coffee mugs (I guess you need special ones for Irish Coffee)

* I'd drink to your health

Which, if you think about it, is pretty funny. So is, "Bottoms Up," if you're emotionally twelve years old. Or drunk.

Off Track

I try.

My God, do I try.

But, gone are the days when you get an "A" for effort. Or even an "E."

I don't deal well with ineptitude, especially my own, of which there is an abundance. Everywhere I look, there are failures positively grafittied with my own personal tag. Some of these blunders are small and rather innocuous, some of them are, well, larger. This house is a testament to my incompetence, my attempts at manliness and homeownerhood. For almost two years now, I have been striving against my Jewishness in a futile attempt to subvert every stereotype about men of my particular faith:

We're just no good at putting things together, or taking things apart, or building things, or creating things other than screenplays.

My maternal grandfather and my father locked horns very early in their relationship. My grandfather had been attempting to subvert our religion one day in 1973 by putting together a table. Of course, I wasn't there to see it, but I can easily visualize him, in his brown plastic eyeglasses, rumpled dress-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pack of Marlboros showing through the thin fabric of the breast pocket, his gray suit trousers, argyle socks and Florsheims, standing in the living room with his hands on his hips, staring vacantly at a pile of wood and hardware, and an instruction manual on the carpet that might as well have been written in Farsi.

I can see it, plain as day. Because, now, I've been there.

He called my father, in a state of extreme frustration, no doubt, because men in my family, on both sides, do not ask for help. My father came in and, don't you know, he didn't just help, he put the table together in under fifteen minutes. Well, my grandfather freaked. He didn't want a magician, and he couldn't have known back then that he'd accidentally called one, he wanted someone with whom to commiserate-- an equal, not a better-- someone with whom he could share frustration, swears, sweat and, eventually, after maybe an hour or two, victory.

This was not a shared victory, and my grandfather knew it. It was a victory won by some hairy Middle Easterner with a two-foot-tall Jew-fro who was having sex with his daughter. And, way past his genteel, middle-class breaking point, poor Zayda popped a gasket. He didn't speak to my father again for three weeks.

While I had hoped that my father's brute strength and modicum of mechanical competence would be passed down to me, it seems that I have inherited only the ability to recognize my own bumbling nature, and I am truly Zayda's grandson. Yesterday was Tuesday, my day off that I somehow always manage to squander, and I decided that yesterday was going to be the day I was going to re-hang our louvered sliding closet door the right way (the previous owners of the house had hung it upsidedown, signaling that I'm not the only domestic retard in the world).

After catching my finger, twice, in the track and shouting several unfriendly words, I managed to get the door off the track.

[Sidebar: whoever invented louvered sliding doors should be disinterred and have his coffin and bones blowtorched.]

The pegs which go into the slots were driven into the door so hard that I had to use at least three tools to pry them out and switch them. In the middle of this process, I left the door lying on the bedroom floor so I could meet my wife for lunch at her work. By the time I came back, I was disoriented and the dogs kept running through my legs and generally getting on my wick but, wouldn't you know it, I got those pegs back in the door and, after catching my finger between the door and the track yet again, I re-hung the door.

Exactly.

The.

Same.

Way.

It.

Was.

Before.

That is to say, upsidedown, again. I stood there for a while, looking at my handiwork. I had my hands on my hips, corduroy trousers, beige socks, beige shirt, brown v-neck sweater, plastic eyeglasses, and I was tempted to scream, to laugh, to say "fuck it" and go watch some television or look at some porn or call someone, anyone, more competent and more heroic than I. More than that, I wanted to call Zayda and tell him, right at that moment, that I loved him more than I ever did when he was alive. More than any of us did.

If You Don't Vote Today....

....President Obama isn't going to like you anymore.

He pretty much told me so in a big, glossy oversized postcard he sent to my house on Saturday.

Because I want President Obama to like me (I don't have many black friends), I'm going to try my damndest to vote on Tuesday. Because I'm serious about him liking me, I'm voting Democratic. I'm also voting that way because I think they're the lesser of two bastards.

There's been a great effort to shame and guilt us Democrats, and people who vote that way because they want one more black friend in their corner ("Well, some of my best friends are black!") to shame and guilt us into voting, to try to make the mid-term elections as sexy as the real-deal was two years ago.

But we know that this isn't sexy. But we're going to vote anyway, because John Stewart told us to. And, when that Jewish man says "Jump," we ask, "With our clothes on?" Funny, when this Jewish man tells people to jump, they're never unclothed. And they just look at me funny.

I know a lot of you are reading this and are kind of on the fence about whether or not you're going to get out there and cock the vote or whatever they're calling it. Well, if I can sway you in the appropriate direction, I'm going to try, because I want you to know that...

...if you don't vote today:

* I'm not going to talk to you anymore. And if you think there's someone out there who's more, um, stimulating than your dear old Apron, well, you'd just better think again, Buster Brown.

* your mom's going to get herpes of the head, Zipper-Lips Syndrome (don't bother to Web MD it, it's real) and cloth tongue.

* everyone in New Hampshire will look at their license plates and will choose the latter.

* you will no longer get A&E-- so, say goodbye to "Intervention" and "Hoarders" and all that other good shit. Fuckin' forget about it-- no more for you, you democracy-hating shitdog.

* for every Democratic seat lost, an angel will get assraped with a frozen garden hose while being forced to eat her own wings.

* your teeth will be ripped out by a Ukranian dental student with acne and replaced with "After 8 Mints."

* your skin will fall off.

* sex will forever feel like taking a pre-Calculus examination.

* your friends will look at you and treat you as if you just bought a puppy from a pet store.

* the Starbucks barista with the cute B-cups and nose-ring will never flirt with you again.

* well, okay, she still will, but you'll now be forever cursed with the awareness that it's just to get tips.

* all ambient winds above two mph will smell like a mixture of semen, kale farts, and an Italian olympic swim team's ladies' locker room.

* you will no longer be welcomed here without a doctor's note and an autographed Fredericks of Hollywood catalog.

Jesus-- that shit is nasty. I can't believe that used to do it for me at 14.

The One With the Waggily Tail

When people don't know what to talk about with other people, they tend talk about their dogs, because it's slightly more interesting than talking about the weather, and it's definitely less provocative than talking about the latest technological advances in clitoral-stim devices, and it's usually more entertaining than talking about their cats. Unless the cats in question are consuming Christmas tinsel and/or string that then comes out of the cat's asshole.

So, people, I've noticed, talk about their dogs-- especially people at work. One psych tech with whom I work was recently bellyaching his misfortune at getting a "fucked up" dog from a shelter. The dog routinely runs, at full tilt, until he collides head-first with the wall, spins around in circles until it throws up and is thought to be, generally speaking, disordered in the brain department.

Spiking off this discussion, one of the nurses on duty approached me with her feelings of guilt that she had purchased a puppy recently from *gasp!* a pet store. She said that she agonized over the decision, because she knew it was "morally wrong" and that she "wouldn't be able to look in the mirror again" after purchasing the dog, but, as she drove away from the store, she called her friend to ask her what should she do, because she had fallen so desperately in love with this one puppy.

"Turn your car around," the friend said, "go back there, and get that goddamned dog."

And the nurse in question did just that, and she loves the dog to pieces.

"Seven hundred dollars later," she said to me, rolling her eyes. Another one of her friends, upon hearing that this nurse had purchased a dog at a *gasp!* pet store, stopped speaking to her.

And this, loves, is where my blog post for today comes in.

I have my opinions about pet stores, and the people and entities who supply pet stores with their, ahem, products. I have my opinions as a self-righteous, two-time "rescuer" of dogs from unpleasant situations. I have my opinions, and you know more than most that I am not shy when it comes to expressing them, but, when our opinions on issues get in the way of our friendships, well, then that is just very, very sad. You can have your beliefs, you can have your thoughts, you can have your views of how the world ought to be, and how others should behave, but try to have a little perspective with your lemon bread, you know?

Pet stores are not evil, the people who purchase pets as opposed to adopting them are not the devil incarnate, and there are breeders who operate responsibly, within the limits of the law, and do their best to respect the dignity of puppy life.

So. There.

Bark.

Walk in Support of MY MASONIC APRON'S 600th BLOGDAY!

I don't remember when we as a society started running and jogging and walking in support of people who have diseases, or for disease awareness, or to do battle with diseases, but it seems to have been going on for quite a while.

Back in elementary school, our gym teacher started a walk (around the permieter of the school) in support of a boy at our school who had a heart condition which killed him when he was in sixth grade. When my wife and I bought our house, we realized that we had moved next door to that little boy's mother, who informed us that my elementary school gym teacher still does the walk to generate awareness for her son's disease, even after all these years have passed.

And I like that.

I say that because I don't want to get people up-in-arms about this blog, and have to suffer through an annoying backlash of hot-and-bothered comments from people who probably didn't even read the post to begin with because, shortly, it's going to get silly, ridiculous, and, yes, say it with me now: offensive around here. Because, really, those of you who know what to expect from me have come to expect just that from me and, chances are, you don't come here for my dashing good looks and superb knowledge of the wine list.

Oh, what am I saying? This post is going to run on Sunday, and nobody reads this shit on Sunday. You're all in church, tithing, like good little twentysomethings or whatever the hell you are.

Yesterday, traffic was appreciably bunged up in my little corner of the wood because of a 5-K walk in honor of something or other-- I don't really know what it was. Maybe it was to raise awareness of something, or to raise money for something-- but it's never just "so you can get exercise because you're fat or have cellulitis," which would be beneficial for a lot of people, but a little too, well, aware and not very, well, you know-- sexy.

So, as my wife and I tried to meander out of our conservative family neighborhood to get to a hipper, ethnic neighborhood for breakfast seated across from middle-aged lesbians, we found it nearly impossible to do this because all of our local streets were blocked off by either police cruisers or aging blockades made of slanting saw-horses. This got us thinking about walks and runs and jogs, and we thought of some good ones that you might want to initiate in your own particular neighborhoods and rally support for. Some would make for excellent t-shirts.

The 10-K Walk for Awareness of Morning Wood

Many people know of the colloquialism, but few people are aware that this condition affects approximately 73.2 million men worldwide between the ages of 13-62. No other penile condition cuts such a dramatic swath across all ethnic, religious, racial and spiritual lines in the male population. Neighborhood flags ought to be lowered to 3/4ths staff during said event.

Jog to Promote Awareness for SNEE

Any woman who's worn a thinly-constructed knit top from Old Navy and then has had the misfortune to walk beneath an air conditioning ceiling vent at work knows the extremely regrettable sensation of SNEE, and the folded arms across the chest, the tucked, introverted posture is a dead giveaway for millions across the globe. Now is the time to raise awareness for this distressing condition. Dress in layers.

Run for Your Cords

Few people appreciate the dramatic impact that corduroy trousers have had on the lives of men and women who shop for leg-covering garmentude at L.L. Bean. For anybody who has ever worn a pair of cords, or who has loved and/or lost someone who has, this is the event to celebrate both skinny and wide wales. This event may also be dubbed "Swish for the Trou."

Jog for Judaism

Also known as the annual Jew Jog, this event raises awareness of and for Jews. Lots of us love throwing our Jewishness in peoples' faces, and here's a way to legitimize that effrontery by wearing black coats and hats, expensive-looking handbags, talking loudly about discounts we've ruthlessly sought out, and complaining about why our children don't call as often as they should.

Race for Facebook

This event should be held in places where awareness of Facebook and other social media sites of the 21st century is sorely lacking, such as Duluth, the state of Alabama, and George Bush, Sr.'s house.

Apron Pride Day

You know you're all up ons this particular event. It's a celebration of My Masonic Apron's 600th post, of all the things that make Mr. Apron Mr. Apron: sarcasm, a foul mouth, earthtones, a random cacophany of reasonably-priced antiques, Victoriana, and music that normal people forsook years ago for target-masturbating, Bluetooth-equipped cars, and cocktails. Dress is business formal, plus a make-your-own-masonic-apron apron.

See you on the street.

Imagine

When I walked into work yesterday, I slid my identification card into the electronic time clock, signed myself up for my assignments for the day, nursed my coffee and nonchalantly eavesdropped on some of the pre-workday conversational chatter I'm not yet confident enough to join in on. See, when you arrive for work for a 7am shift at 6:40, you sign up for assignments inside the nurses' station and you are actually not permitted to enter the unit until 7:00am on the dot. So, you sit or stand and you chat or you listen.

Yesterday, I listened. And I heard that a patient, a 23-year-old young man who was discharged just a few days ago was dead.

"He just walked out into the middle of the street, right in front of a car."

They don't know for certain if it was a suicide, but, when you have an incident like this, befalling a recently-released former patient of a mental institution who had been expressing suicidal ideations and bizarre behavior, well, even I can put two and two together and get pretty close to four.

For the purposes of this blog, we'll call the recently departed "Ellis." I first met Ellis about three weeks ago. I was sitting in the activities room on the Acute Unit, writing a report, and he was shuffling towards me. I saw him from out of the corner of my eye. When you work in a psychiatric hospital, filled with prisoners and assaultive patients and convicted murderers, mixed in with the just plain manic, bipolar and disorganized, you tend to use the corner of your eye a lot more than the eye itself. I guess that's why a peripheral vision test is part of the pre-employment physical. It's kind of a big deal.

Anyway, Ellis was shuffling over to me. He had no shoes or socks on, and he was wearing a pair of black and red checked pajama bottoms and a black t-shirt that was full of holes. He had stubble, but it was kid stubble, the kind you could shave dry if you wanted to, maybe once a week and nobody'd notice. His hair was, well, fucked up. Light socket style-- Emmett Brown kind of a thing. It looked as if a bird, or several birds, had been nesting in there for a few months. His teeth were in disarray and, as he approached me, I put down my pen and looked at him.

"Can I talk to you, please?" he said to me in a small, meek voice.

"Sure," I said, "pull up a chair."

And he did. I really don't remember what we talked about, to be honest with you. He told me that he'd been a drifter for a while, I think, and that he'd gone off his meds, and that he was looking forward to "getting everything straightened out." I asked him the standard question we ask everyone, "Do you have any thoughts of harming yourself or anybody else?" He said "No." He appeared able to carry on a legitimate conversation. Five minutes after he walked away from me, he was taking off his clothes in the middle of the hallway. Maybe half-an-hour later, he had to be redirected for wandering in and out of other patients' rooms, ignoring directions, and for trying to escape onto the general ward through a secure door.

He shuffled down the hallway as if he were impervious to his surroundings, as some of our patients do, and believe themselves to be. He had to be watched closely, his behavior was unpredictable. But, after three days of good behavior, he was moved onto the general ward. There, he isolated himself, occasionally going to a group or two. Just a few days ago, I was monitoring the hall, and he shuffled towards me again.

"Can we talk?" he asked.

"Definitely, Ellis. Have a seat."

He talked, and I listened. Again, nothing remarkable. Not much I can really recall. Maybe that says more about me than it does about him. But it's kind of funny because I usually have such an uncanny ability to memorize dialogue and recall what patients say to me, but not Ellis. For some reason, his complaints or questions or statements just sort of blend into the milieu with dozens of other patients I've seen and talked to and interacted with.

But Ellis will be remembered by me as the first patient I ever heard play the piano at our hospital. One day while doing rounds, I walked towards the piano room, which is really never used for its intended purpose, and I heard a sound that made me stop for a moment. It was music. Music amidst the paranoid ramblings, the swearing on the payphone, the frustrated refusals of patients who won't take their meds because they "distort my face" or because the nurses are "poisoning the Crystal Light." There was music. I softened my step, so as not to disturb the beautiful, soft, pedaled strains of a song I recognized, but wasn't too big a fan of.

John Lennon's "Imagine."

As I walked past the piano room, pretending to be more interested in my rounds checklist, I glanced out of that trusty corner of my eye and saw Ellis, sporting his unmistakable, haphazard hairdo, seated at the piano, playing from sheet music-- I don't know where he got it. And, standing there singing, in a soft, sweet voice, was a one of my favorite patients-- "R," the religiously-preoccupied lady with a tidy sum in the bank, who won't use it until God speaks to her, and remains homeless to this day. "God," I thought as I passed the room, on my merry way, "what a pair."

And now Ellis is dead, "with God," as R would say, and I wonder if she knows that her accompanist is gone.