“I cannot be held responsible for what my giggling little hind-brain may kick up”

I found myself in a large performance space, with tiered risers and chairs and music stands arranged for the orchestra that was present. The amphitheater was filled with teen and pre-teen wunderkinds all playing violin. Along with myself, also holding a violin and bow, but not able to keep up with what was most likely Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, K525, Allegro. So I just sat there looking at them. This is likely related to my college-age attempt to learn to fiddle, my current attempts to teach myself guitar, and the 15 year-old guitar playing psychiatric patient I'd seen the day before. After the session, I left the building and found myself walking up the slope from the Hill Theater at Kenyon College, still toying with the violin that I was carrying. I was asked if I played often by one of the early Harry Potter-esque younglings that was leaving with me. Nope, just learning.

I walked up spiral stairs that I recognized from the old Philip Mather Hall, entering a room reminiscent of one of the small-group seminar rooms of Kenyon College, perhaps Ascension?, complete with wood panels, large tables with high-backed chairs, and narrow neo-collegiate-Gothic-architecture leaded windows. You know, the kind that grace the pages of the Kenyon brochures (“Our student to teacher to cow to corn ratio is 3 to 1 to 2 to 17,000!”).

Myself, Junior Year, with Tim Shutt as Santa (Kenyon, 1997)

As I circled the table (“rectangled” the table?) to grab my seat, Mr. Campbell, my 9th grade Drama and English teacher at Jackson Junior High, looked up quizzically and asked, “Hunter transfer?” This was interesting because my only associations with Hunter College are a reference f om Terry Gilliam's “The Fisher King,” as a subway stop on the Upper East Side 6 train, and where my girlfriend completed a masters of Social Work-- the latter two being several years after Kenyon and at least a decade after junior high.
No, I was just attending as a “conditional” student-- meaning I signed up but could not be assured of a place in the class. I knew it would be good to take this apparently philosophy course for my personal education even though it wasn't my field and would be new for me. I might have to end up auditing, or taking it for no credit. Especially, Mr. Campbell pointed out to me, as I hadn't taken the required seminar the semester prior. He slid over to me a brochure of the same, which had former Kenyon President Rob Oden's picture on the cover.

The class continued with the student to my left, who turned out to be Wes Overby, a kid I knew from elementary school, but who looked like he did in high school (long hair, earring, I think a Metallica t-shirt) reading from a small booklet of what sounded like Austrian German philosophy. In Austrian German. All I know is that he seemed to be reading from the middle of the page up, to “heighten the emotional impact” of the text, he said, when Mr. Campbell pointed this out to him. And that at one point he said the word “auerwuff,” which I don't think is a real word, but which I transcribed in my book as “Airwolf?!?”

It was then my turn to read. I struggled over a few of the words, affecting a thick movie accent (half of speaking a foreign language is a fake accent anyway), before Wes and Mr. Campbell started helping me by pronouncing the words along with me. I eventually asked if the required seminar was one in which you were taught Austrio-German. Across the table, a stern looking blond body-builder type who had no business being a college student-- in fact I'm pretty sure he was the Austrian hit-man from “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie-- sneered and took over reading.

So, interpretations? I'm open to them-- fear of trying new things? Too many movies seen? Too many shifts in a row? Let me know what you think. Today, I have to do some left over dishes, go grocery shopping, practice some guitar, do some of the CORD tests online for Board Prep, and head to the hospital to do some left over charts. Then hopefully head to the West Coast for some beach time. Obedient to some strange spell,

--aws