Birthday Salon: Act II

Act II

My beautiful wife has finished up playing Turn Me On on the piano for her DIY birthday artist salon party. Now the party is at a crossroads. Are our friends willing to perform with only the promise of veggie lasagna and good beer? They have eaten our lasagna. They are drinking our beer. Is this when they say goodnight? I consider rushing the stage with the only family-friendly joke I can remember (“What’s brown and sticky?” Answer “A stick.”) when seven-week old Diego is thrust into my arms and his mama strides purposely to the other end of our living room. This is where a microphone on a mike stand has been plugged into a guitar amplifier. I wonder if this is sufficient to make it a “stage.” One only has to stand behind the mike to realize that it does command attention. Is it the amplification that makes it a stage? Or is a “stage” just a conceit of the socially-constructed false dichotomy of entertainer/ entertainee that perpetuates a capitalist hegemony over our “freetime”.

Diego and I go in search of someone willing to hear out this rant. Perhaps it has potential for my blog. All I would need is a song (I haven’t used Thelonious Monk in a long time) and a cute kid’s story and then presto, Blog Magic. I look to Diego and await a cute story. He blinks at me. I consider how one works with blinking (admittedly it’s not much) and look up as Diego’s papa begins checking the tuning of his ten-string Chilean charango. He bangs on his bass drum bomba a few times to let us know that he fully intends to turn our at the cross-roads party onto the highway and not into the ditch. Diego’s mama is adjusting the reeds of a zampoña. The reeds are pieces of cane of varying lengths and circumferences. Diego’s mama adjusts them so that the canes all line up and then she blows across the top of one of the reeds. It makes the sound of a long abandoned Coke bottle, left from a time when Coke came in a bottle. She nods at Diego’s papa and he gets this party started.

Boom-Boom-BoomBoom-Boom.

I wonder if the word bomba counts as onomatopoeic and smile down at Diego who feels just right nestled into the crook of my arm, like this is why my arm has a crook. Diego is content. He is not missing his mama at all. I still got it. My body still remembers how to cradle a baby. It’s just like riding a bike except that you shouldn’t ride a bike with a baby (A PSA brought to you by the Societal Council Alliance for Bike-Baby Safety, or SCABBS).

Diego’s mama catches the groove on the zampoña. Her breath jumps from reed to reed. Each note is a different reed and she blows the melody with all the confidence but thankfully with none of the magic of Zamfir (www.panflute.net). I look down for Diego’s reaction.

Amazon.com Widgets

Boom-Boom-BoomBoom-Boom.

Notice how Diego’s eyes blinks each time the rhythm comes around to the one. He is a seven-week old drumming genius! He is a maestro! He is conducting the band with his eyes! But no, now he blinks on the two and then on the four. Now he is blinking completely off the rhythm. Is he blinking some kind of code? Perhaps he has he gone Sun-Ra experimental? I make a mental note to see if Sun- Ra’s Outer Space Employment Agency has anything particularly kid-friendly. You know, for the Blog Magic.

Boom-Boom-BoomBoom-Boom.

I stop trying to follow the young maestro’s lead and instead find Diego’s mama taking over the drumstick and catching the rhythm on the bomba. She is rock steady. In turn, Diego’s papa begins playing the charango. The charango looks like its origins, a small ten-string guitar made out of an armadillo. Diego’s papa’s hand becomes a bird that flutters over the strings, and then takes off. Everyone is dancing or clapping or shaking their shaker and we are all terribly impressed with Diego’s parents. The song ends and the kids go wild and we all whoop and stomp our feet. Diego is soundly asleep. Your party is no longer just that birthday when you played that Norah Jones song. We have got a full-on bohemian rhapsody!