Manhattan Transfer

Too sick to get out of bed, I knew I was doomed.

Every February, in the death grip of winter, Interlochen would suspend its regular classes for a week of what they called Open Curriculum. Teachers would offer non-academic classes on crafts or the fun aspects of mathematics (of course there are) or whatever and the students (and staff) would get a break from the grueling schedule at a time when everything seemed bleakest. It was a great idea and helped everyone get over that awful hump between Christmas and spring break. Perversely, my mom would often offer a class on baking luscious deserts, which was always well attended by the dancers in her charge. Every other week of the year, she’d lecture them on staying slim and check their weights and write them down on her chart of doom, and now, here she was, offering slabs of chocolate smothered in clouds of whipped cream and shot through with butter, which they were only too happy to consume – but then they’d have to run back to the dorm and stick their fingers down their throats so they could pass the next week’s weigh in. Each year would also see some brave teacher or two taking a bunch of hopped up high school students who were going a little cabin crazy on a trip somewhere. One year, the drama teacher took a bunch of drama students to New York City. I don’t know what she was thinking. First of all, taking a bunch of adolescent actors anywhere is a really bad idea, but lifting them out of the frozen wonderland of Interlochen and dropping them into the middle of the most intense city in the country for a week is a suicidal mission. But, everybody came back so I guess it went well.

Interlochen was (and still is) known for its strong faculty in both the academics and the arts, but there were a few legendary teachers that everybody tried to experience. Mr. Dean, an intense and charismatic social studies teacher who had the gift of making whatever arcane subject you were studying (Thomas Aquinas, the battle at Antietem) seem urgently entertaining, was one of the more popular. During the spring of my last year, Eric and Bob and I got up at like five in the morning one weekend day so we could go get in line to sign up for the next round of social studies classes. We wanted to be sure to secure a spot in his wildly popular Civil War class. We got to the social studies rotunda three hours before registration started, and there was already a line of people camped out on the cold tile floor of the concourse. If you got there after 7:00am – a full two hours before registration started – you’d have to pick some other course, because all three classes of Civil War were already filled – and those three classes could accommodate almost a quarter of the students on campus. People also fought tooth and nail to get into a class taught by Mr. Hintze, a quiet, bookish professor of literature, whose specialty was British literature (Brit Lit) and who, every other year, taught a class on Shakespeare that the drama geeks would go nuts for. In many ways the opposite of Mr. Dean, Mr. Hintze’s quiet, piercing intelligence and obvious love for his subject were contagious, and caused sixteen-year-olds to gleefully leap into the thorny thickets of Eliot and Joyce – I often skipped lunch so I could stay after class and talk to him some more. Math teacher Hugo Trepte personified the mad mathematician stereotype with hair akimbo and enthusiasm for the arcana of numbers and systems pouring out of him. Goofy in the extreme – especially to cool-conscious high school students – his love of all things mathematical was so winning that even the most jaded jazz student would suddenly be glowing with intensity as they worked to unravel the mysteries of Pythagoras. And in the science department, Mr. Chamberlain was untouchable. He taught but one class – Ecology – but it was a subject he lived and breathed. He even wrote the text book for the class. Although there was some time spent in the classroom discussing the life cycle of forests or the importance of the water table, most of the class time would be spent out in the woods, exploring trees and birds and following scat trails and eating grubs and really getting to know the natural world on its own terms. Every student who was lucky enough to get into that class left with a profound and life-long appreciation of all things natural. So when he offered a week-long Open Curriculum trip to the Okeefenokee Swamp, I leapt at the chance.

Unfortunately, when it came time for the last planning meeting, I was too sick to go. I knew that canoe and tent partners were to be chosen at that meeting and I also knew that by not being there, I would end up with the worst partner and would probably be elected president as well. Sure enough, at the meeting it was decided that my partner would be the percussion teacher, Mr. Schneller, who had agreed to come along to help chaperone. Not that he was so bad, really, but he was slow and he snored incredibly loudly (didn’t get one decent night of sleep that week) and, because he was always the last one ready in the morning (“what’s the rush?”), we’d always get stuck with the SCRA bucket.

The Okeefonekee Swamp is just that – hundreds of miles of swamp stretching across southern Georgia and northern Florida. Being a swamp, there’s no place to land, so the Southern Canal Recreation Association built occasional (very occasional) wooden platforms to camp out on. And they also supplied each group with a large yellow bucket emblazoned with their initials to be used as a human waste receptacle. A shit bucket, in other words. And because we were always the last canoe to leave the platform in the morning, we always got to be keepers of the SCRA bucket.

In his defense, Schneller had a lot to put up with. In order to get to the swamp, we had to drive from Michigan (northern Michigan, thank you very much) to Georgia (that’s southern Georgia) in two days. We took two vans and put CB radios in each (those were the days) so we could communicate with each other on the trip. Schneller’s van (for whatever reason, he’s one of those people who just gets known by their last name), was green and we needed a “handle” to use on the radio, so he chose Copper Kettle – in honor of the timpani (and copper does sort of turn green) and Mr. Chamberlain, driving a yellow van, chose the name Solar Roller. This simple act of naming his van the Solar Roller opened a gigantic, unforeseen (and, really, unforeseeable) can of worms. Once on the road, we decided to start playing Hinky Pinky over the CBs. For those unfamiliar with the game, one person – or, in this case, team – would come up with a pair of rhyming words (“fat cat”) and then give synonymous clues (“portly feline”). In order to give the guessers an additional clue, you tell them how many syllables each word has. So, you’d say, “I’ve got a hink pink for puffy pussy” and they’d know each word had one syllable, or you could say “I have a hinkity pinkity for “frozen velocipede” and they’d have to come up with “icicle bicycle”, or you could mix them up and give somebody a hinkididdle pinkity for “ballerina’s virginity” and then they’d have to come up with Kate Cadenhead’s maidenhead. Anyway, it’s an entertaining game to play for a few minutes to pass the time. We played it for just about 17 hours straight – pretty much the entire trip down to Georgia. How either Schneller or Mr. Chamberlain kept from driving headlong into a semi just to end the game is something I’ll never know. That alone should overshadow all the snoring and SCRAing, but it didn’t.

Many of us, myself included, were laboring under the false assumption that, because we were going to Florida, it was going to be warm and sunny. In fact, that was half of the appeal of the trip. I think it maybe hit 50 degrees one day, but that was certainly the high for the trip. It was so cold the entire time that nobody changed clothes or even took off their coats and hats. By the time we got back, I realized that I had been wearing my woolen winter hat for over a week without ever taking it off. And I wasn’t alone. Nobody bathed or changed for the entire experience, which made the 17-hour trip back especially pungent. When we finally got back, I took the most wonderful shower of my entire life, blissfully letting the warmth flow over me until the hot water heater was empty.

Which isn’t to say that the trip wasn’t fun. It was a remarkable experience canoeing around those primordial waters for so many days. The creatures were pretty scarce, as most of them were reptiles and wouldn’t be caught dead out and about in such cold weather. But there was one moment when Mr. Chamberlain motioned us to paddle quietly over to where his canoe was. Next to the canoe, lying perfectly still, was an alligator. We marveled at it and whispered about it for a few minutes, before Mr. Chamberlain decided the alligator must be dead because he wasn’t moving. So Mr. Ecology took his canoe paddle and whacked the alligator on the head. Well, it turned out that the alligator wasn’t dead at all, he was just resting and trying to soak up what little warmth there was, and he thrashed around so hard that Mr. Chamberlain was knocked back into the canoe (fortunately). Shakily steadying himself, he grinned sheepishly and recommended that we should probably just leave him alone before paddling off.

Schneller and I weren’t getting along particularly well, and it blew up on our last night, when I couldn’t stand his snoring any more and started pummeling him to get him to shut up. He woke up and yelled at me and I yelled back and you could hear muffled giggles coming out of the other tents and drifting across the inky swamp. But for all his foibles and irritants, he did one thing on that trip that I am especially grateful for. He played a tape of the new Manhattan Transfer album, Extensions. I knew a little bit about them, but they never really appealed to me, jazz not being my particular cup of noise. But this was something different. A lot of the numbers had a shiny production sheen to them, and some sounded downright new wave, especially the transplendant Coo Coo U, which has to be just about the least typical track in their repertoire – hence its inclusion here. I also liked Birdland and was particularly intrigued by the closing number, a beautiful a capella version of an old Tom Waits song that was filled with strange harmonies and even stranger lyrics, such as