...it's not Prokofiev

A family story on Edith's Mor-mor recounts the time when, as a toddler, she responded to an adult who was trying to interest her in some pop music, "It's all right, but it's not Tchaikovsky."

Edith appears to be following in her Mor-mor's footsteps. I went ahead and purchased Peter and the Wolf last week, and she is taken with it. She went to bed listening to it several nights in a row before I realized that she had sorted out which themes went with which characters (for the most part--she's murky on the duck and the cat). Now she asks to listen to the album several times a day. She decided yesterday that she's frightened by the wolf, which she demonstrates by clenching her fists, voluntarily trembling, and announcing, "Edith scehhed woohf."

In a different musical vein, we took her to her first concert this past Saturday. Dan Zanes--rocker turned children's music star--was in town with his band, and we snagged three seats with my student pass. I had visions of Edith getting squirmy and fussy and everyone throwing us looks, so we opted for seats in the back on the aisle to facilitate a quick getaway. Then, figuring she'd be more likely to sit still if the songs were familiar to her, I got a Dan Zanes CD from the public library. (In browsing the children's music shelves I also picked up Presidential Campaign Songs, 1789-2000 and Lullabies from the Axis of Evil. It makes sense to me--but if Edith buys into the stereotypes out there, I expect she'll be confused. Are her parents patriotic? Anti-patriotic? Nationalists? Rebels? For us? Against us? It's something she'll have to work out for herself.) On the morning of the concert I told Edith several times that we were going to hear children's music in a big theater, and that we all needed to sit quietly and listen.

As it turned out, we needn't have worried about being singled out for bad behavior. For one thing, Edith was far from the youngest child there. For another, the whole theater was a writhing mass of toddlers dancing in the aisles, parents of the reluctant encouraging their toddlers to dance in the aisles, and parents of the really reluctant doing the dancing in the aisles on their toddlers' behalf. Children ran races up and down the aisles, cried, asked to go the bathroom. Parents greeted their friends, dried tears, took children to the bathroom. There was a father near us, probably a Wall Street exec, who when Dan Zanes sang a song about trains started organzing all the nearby children and parents into a conga line to go up and down the aisles, booming out his instructions about who was to put their hands on whose shoulders.

And through all this...Edith slept. When we first got to the theater she pointed out the drumset on stage. She stared surprised at Dan Zanes and company as they entered singing down the aisle right next to us. She watched them up onto stage and through the first number. And then she settled down in my lap and dozed off. None of the frolicking stirred her.

It's oddly conspicuous to be the parents of the only kid in the crowd who is sleeping. Every other adult there was in constructively-silly-and-upbeat, engage-your-toddler mode, clapping along, making all the requisite animal sounds, beaming these huge broad smiles as if it had been their life dream to see Dan Zanes in the flesh. But once your kid falls asleep, all that enthusiasm falls flat. It's so obviously a song and dance with your own kid as primary audience that animation without said audience feels like tap dancing in front of a blank wall. So we sat there stiff and quiet amidst the chaos, trying to pretend that we were still glad to be spending our Saturday at this fantastic concert, but secretly wondering who all these frenetic people were and whence they derived their joy.

Edith woke up during the last number. She rubbed her eyes and stared around her at the pandemonium for a few minutes before commenting, "Chu-dren's music." I'm pretty sure she was just recalling where she was. But it sounded rather like the classical enthusiast looking down her nose.

Which she can certainly do when she pleases, as witnessed last week at daycare--excuse me, the firehouse: