Lest you think that we're low-browed Philistines, I want you to know that we did both Art and Music today. Part of the Music Appreciation was a Victor Borge video which had us laughing so much we had to stop and rerun it a few times because we missed the punchlines. In between the jokes and pratfalls, he played some Mozart (you know, the Swedish composer, Hans Christian Mozart), some Guiseppe Verdi (Joe Green) and a waltz by Franz Liszt, or as Borge called him, Fliszt.
I've been enjoying Victor Borge since I was knee high to a coloratura, and my kids find him hysterical. They tend to lapse into his phonetic punctuation language at odd moments (where he uses voice to make sound effects as punctuation marks) , thus spluttering colons and dashes all over the place and getting weird looks from people who don't speak the language.
One of the things I love about Borge is his subtlety. I didn't realize when I was a kid how slightly risque some of his jokes were. For instance, when he finds out there are children in the audience, he says "Then I won't be able to do the second half of the show nude." Then he pauses. "Wearing a tie." Another pause and an arched eyebrow. "A long tie." A slightly evil grin. "A very long tie."
He describes, sings, and plays the music for an opera. It's a dramatic piece about a young man, who hides behind one of two big trees on stage, waiting for his beloved, who shows up and hides behind the other big tree on the other side of the stage. (Well, sort of. Borge says she's a large woman. Four and a half feet tall. Lying down. So she hides behind the tree and completely surrounds it.)
The young woman's father, who doesn't want the couple to marry, shows up and the woman sings a death aria and then kills herself. So Borge sings the woman's part - no words, mostly incomprehensible nonsense syllables, but soprano. Then he mimics stabbing himself in the chest and says, "And she stabbed herself right between those two giant ... Trees."
Earlier in the day, on the way to the post office, we listened to Hawaian Slack Key Guitar by Led Kaapana and some Gypsy Jazz from the CD my niece gave me for my birthday. On the way back, we listened to Slaid Cleaves and John McCutcheon. A little klezmer music and some Weird Al while we had an afternoon snack and we were good to go. Oh, I almost forgot, Daughter continued the Music lessons by brushing her teeth with a Tooth Tunes toothbrush.
Art is just something that my kids do almost constantly. Son is working on a picture of his cousin that her mother commissioned. He's also drawing dragons, working on hands and skin tones, and getting better and better at what will probably be the center of his life forever. Like every artist I know, he's never satisfied with his work and is always his toughest critic. I guess that's how artists get better at their craft, but it's rough on the ol' self esteem sometimes.
Daughter is working on frogs, elephants, ducks, birds and who knows what all else, mostly as fairies. She says she's going to work with elephants when she grows up and that may be, but she's really good at art too, so maybe she could draw elephants or teach them to paint better like the one whose painting is in my dentist's office.
I cannot for the life of me imagine how anyone would think of having an elephant paint. I mean, was someone painting near an elephant and it grabbed the brush, dipped it into some vermilion and started whipping it across the canvas? Were they painting its portrait? Painting a fence? How in the world did the elephant know to paint on the canvas? Why didn't it just paint on the nearest tree or on its keeper? These are the kinds of questions that keep me awake at night while Geekdaddy snores so loudly he rattles the pocket protector in his pajama pocket.
Then there's this art site, DrawFluffy, which I discovered today and where we'll probably be spending a lot of time for awhile. No elephant paintings, but lots of other neat stuff. How to draw Fluffy, the three-headed dog in Harry Potter and other Harry Potter critters. Free wildlife posters and ebooks and Natural History ebooks. Jonni, the site's owner, has put together a really nice collection of art links and info too. She says that anyone can learn to draw if they can "draw" the alphabet. I never thought of it like that.
I'm afraid though that even Jonni would give up on teaching me to draw. Back when I went to school, I was the despair of Mrs. Schmidt, the art teacher, who told us to get out our Crayola's and our "vanilla" paper and practice making ovals for faces. I think she was just jealous because I was the only kid whose faces looked like they'd been done by a famous painter. Too bad she didn't like Edvard Munch.
Lill Hawkins lives in Maine and writes about family life, home education and being a WAHM at http://hawkhillacres.blogspot.com . Get the News From Hawkhill Acres: A mostly humorous look at home schooling, writing and being a WAHM, whose mantra is "I'm a willow; I can bend."
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