Tendency No. 3
“Public Service Announcements”
the tendency to nest, poorly
I spent a LOT of time on the R train when I lived in Brooklyn. The R train is old, creaky, and makes every single, painful stop from the bottom of Brooklyn, through all of Manhattan, to the end of Queens.
One night, as I settled myself into the plastic bench for another hour and a half of noisy, jolting fun, I looked up and saw a poster. It was a public service advertisement, featuring a gnome of the garden variety, sitting on a chair in what appeared to be a children’s play-room. Above the gnome’s creepy smile read the headline, “Safe and Healthy Homes for Children.” The copy was something about keeping your children from licking the lead paint off the walls.
And so of course me and my obsessive mind spent the entire trip to Manhattan writing a piece of light comic opera about this. Safe and Healthy Homes for Children, governmental gnomes suggest. They paint a picture in subway advertisements of untidy homes, and great unrest.
Sadly, one poster does not an entire song make, and I’ve been unable to find any other posters from this campaign, and so the song has been just sitting in my head for forever now.
But then there was a flood in the Midwest, and an article on the news about how everyone knew that their houses were built on a floodplain, but that no ones basement had been flooded in YEARS, and those kinds of things never really happen to people like us, and they did nothing about it.
And so I have taken the liberty of writing these home owners a short public service announcement, and smooshing it onto the end of this song.
It might make sense topically, even if it’ll be a little musically disjointed. Why do we invest our life savings in homes that we know are going to be flooded? Why do we have to raise children in leaded apartments? Why did I choose to rent an apartment in a building where the roaches outnumber the humans 300,000,000:1? Is our species really that terrible at nesting? Talk about an animal tendency gone awry.
Kristin Mueller-Heaslip will sing about gnomes and Jennifer Ryan will sing about floodplains AND! this song will also feature the Tiny Alligator debut of Alex Samaras WHISTLING! and let me tell you folks, this boy can whistle. Holy cow.
Thursday, April 15th , 8 pm, at the Music Gallery (www.musicgallery.org).
