Catch That And Paint It Green, or, A Populist Parable

What it was, was that I got reminiscent with the Engineer this evening, now that I find that I am old enough to reminisce, and having recently enjoyed an online conversation with someone who played the krummhorn in her day — about half way between the bagpipes and the oboe my father once stuck into my face — I remembered the Lenten morality play.

These little dramas were the ancestors of modern theater, and the Society for Creative Anachronism — where I was once a court jester and performed various contortions and sight gags — occasionally produced one. The Lady Signy Dimmridaela, who had a krummhorn of her very own, scripted one for the penitent season.

It’s a joke. Possibly you know a version of it.

Scene 1: A church on the eve of Lent. Various parishioners utter their vows as to the Lenten austerities they plan to observe. Last of all, a little peasant swears to subsist only on beans and onions for the obligatory forty days.

Plaster saints and angels, portrayed en tableaux by living actors, cringe and wrinkle their noses.

Scene 2: Services within the cycle of Lent. At the end of every clerical exhortation, there is a sound effect to be produced by an aggressively voiced krummhorn.

Nearly asphyxiated parishioners converge upon the little onion-and-bean-eating peasant and thrash him within an inch — yea, beyond an inch — of his mortal life.

Scene 3: The Gates of Hell. The Great Adversary, Satan, toys with his prey, suggesting that they can escape by setting him a task he cannot execute. An avaricious man demands that all the riches of the world be set at his feet. They are — for a split second before his damnation. A power-hungry prince demands dominion over all the realms of this world — and has it, for a split second.

Then the little peasant reaches the head of the line and stares Great Satan in the eye. Hikes a hip, and lets loose a violent reverberation, a veritable cacophony in the finest etymological sense of the word. [Krummhorn eructation]
“Catch that,” says he, “and paint it green.”

And serenely, smugly, the little peasant ascends to Heaven…

So much for the princes of this world.

A blessed Lenten season unto you.

 

On Being An Eleven-Year-Old Boy

At least that’s what my Cute Engineer said, once or twice. I believe he is a lad of more delicate sensibilities than my own; but then I am the daughter of a horn player and, as I have mentioned elsewhere, performers on brass instruments are perpetual adolescents one and all, who could not have persisted to virtuosity had they not a genial tolerance for the flatulent noises that a French horn or tuba will make in the early stages of mastery.

For a short time, around the era of my divorce, I maintained a weekend dinner date with a slightly neurotic but comfortingly ailurophile lady who fancied garlicky haricots and Belgian beers. Our mutual aesthetic broke down on the matter of gender bias. “Something I don’t understand about men,” she said, “is that men think farts are funny.”

You mean they’re not?

The celestial Mark Twain – however privately, in his day — gave us “1601, or, CONVERSATION, AS IT WAS BY THE SOCIAL FIRESIDE, IN THE TIME OF THE TUDORS.”

Ye Queene.—Verily in mine eight and sixty yeres have I not heard the fellow to this fart. Meseemeth, by ye grete sound and clamour of it, it was male; yet ye belly it did lurk behinde shoulde now fall lean and flat against ye spine of him yt hath bene delivered of so stately and so waste a bulk, where as ye guts of them yt doe quiff-splitters bear, stand comely still and rounde. Prithee let ye author confess ye offspring.

In latter days, Doctor Demento circulated this treasure.

Okay, so I’m an eleven-year-old boy. What the fuck. I never pretended to be ladylike from day one. Pull my finger.

EDIT: I used to hang out with a redneck from Vienna — Virginia, not Austria — who cued me in to the original of which the above tune is a parody. It occurs to me that it’s been years since it was current. Le voila:

Air On A G String

My Albino Ex was (and may still be, though he is dating fancier women now) a man of few inhibitions. I believe I won his heart the first time we went out to view the Independence Day fireworks — 1998, think of it — and he ripped off a sonorous fart, about a G sharp above middle C, to which my only reaction was “Good intonation but needs more diaphragm support.” I’m a hornplayer’s daughter; fart jokes were in the air I breathed as a child, if that’s the way to phrase it.

There were times when he really pushed the envelope, but I have to admit his method for keeping civic meetings brief — which involved a preliminary meal at Hard Times Chili Cafe, with extra onions and habanero — might be profitably emulated by the US Congress.

I still send him things like this, which a comment over at Daddy Papersurfer’s caused me to recall.

The music is actually Rimsky-Korsakov, not Bach, but I claim poetic license.

Bach’s Birthday

I almost let March 21 go by without mentioning this Baroque landmark.

My local radio station is airing the Mass in B Minor, starting in a few minutes. Because I am depraved, my mind flashed to a limerick beloved of my hornplayer father. I always thought of it as part of my dowry, since it was one of the few limericks that were new to my late and ex husband.

There was a young fellow from Sparta
Who was a phenomenal farter.
He could fart anything
From “God Save The King”
To Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

He would fart a gavotte for a starter,
Then the D-Minor Fugue and Toccata.
Then boom from his ass
Bach’s B Minor Mass
And arias from “La Traviata.”

The Limerick Memorial, Sunday, May 31, 2009

You cannot separate limericks from crudity. My late and ex, firmly of the pre-silicon generation, added a riff by compounding technology with scatology.  He was both repelled and fascinated by the things that people could do with electronics and acutely sensitive to the way that connectivity allowed people to do better, faster and oftener a lot of things that probably shouldn’t have been done at all.

Hence:

There was an ambitious young nerd
Who learned how to e-mail a turd.
“For,” he said, “as you know,
UPS is too slow,
And to send it FedEx is absurd.”

This pleased him so much that he tried a second riff on it:

A quirky inventor named Prine
Has a way to send feces online.
He says “It’s my vision
To speed up transmission,
But downloading works out just fine.”

In a final ethereal salvo he penned:

There was an inventor named Martz
Whose whim was to fax all his farts.
With his ass greased with Crisco
He sent one to Frisco
After several erroneous starts.

While not one of those males who enjoy breaking wind as a competitive sport, the idea of creative flatulence appealed to the man. I once asked him if he wanted to come along with me to my gym, which is near a quaintly named shopping center, and spend the time while I worked out “farting around Seven Corners.” “I’m not that agile,” he said.