>>> Item number 6242 from WRITERS LOG9211D --- (110 records) ----- <<< Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1992 11:44:53 JST Reply-To: WRITERS Sender: WRITERS From: Mike Barker Subject: submission: toe-tapping tunes This one is just for fun, so grimace and bare it. Toe-Tapping Tunes copyright 1992 m. barker 861 words I never knew George could smile until the symphony. He was a nice guy, of course, but so serious. He thought none of us took music seriously enough, and he was scared. After all, he had every intention of being a major composer, known around the world. Sadly, he was almost twenty-one, and he also knew that every major composer had made his mark long before getting that old. So when the tone shoe hit the market, and everyone started squeaking through the student center, you could see him wince every time someone took a step. The first kind wasn't so bad, just different notes for different folks. But within a month, the competition had introduced programmable shoes, so everyone's toes tapped out their own tunes. When someone added instrumental selection, you could even walk to a different drummer .. of your choice! And then they sold the army on it, with music selected by the General Staff playing while they marched. Oddly, I think that's what put George onto his idea. Watching the ROTC boys march in step with their boots kicking out the sounds, the fellows in back drumming, the ones in front bugling, well, it was a real marching band. So George started recruiting around the music school, and pretty soon some of the prof's were pushing the city to let them conduct an experimental symphony - composed by one of our boys, and played on those shoes. The newspapers caught it, somehow, and ran some laughing pieces. Then the whole thing snowballed. I've never figured out whether George, a professor, or maybe one of the shoe salesmen pushed the networks into covering it, but suddenly public television was going to carry the whole thing live, while the major networks were at least going to send crews to cover it. There was a video contract offered by one of the big outfits from the west coast, but nobody could figure out who it should be with, so that fell through. George by now was running practices constantly. His eyes slowly nodded when you talked to him, although I couldn't tell if he was nodding in time to his own dreams of the symphony or just falling asleep. You see, even though he started with music students, teaching someone to walk with the right steps to make the shoes sound off when he wanted them to was hard. Getting music students to walk repeatedly and at length was hard - they all knew about practice, but were used to somewhat less energetic methods. And then the choreographers got into the act. The entire school had heard about the symphony, and some of the students realized that this was practically a new form of dance. After all, George was making the "instrumentalists" take one step forward, pause, then a half-step, hop, step again, and so on. Did he care if they started in specific positions, and maybe turned at certain points? George stopped for a moment, dead still, then asked them to show him what they meant. Two of them shrugged, then put on some of the spare shoes and walked through a simple intersecting path. George yelled at them to do it again, then walked carefully back several paces and stared at the ground while they walked back, reset their shoes, and repeated the little manuever. They stopped, and waited. George shook his head, then yelled, "That's it. I knew it, it will be perfect!" Then he grabbed his score and started scribbling madly on the back of it. When we got him calmed down enough to talk, he explained that he'd known something was wrong with the simple forward walk he'd had the "instrumentalists" doing, but he hadn't known what it was. Now he saw that having moving instruments changed the whole thing, that he needed to have the sounds moving throughout the symphony. So the big day came, and half the city skipped work to see this. After all, it isn't every day that you get to see people make complete fools of themselves. And the symphony was great. Somehow, those simple tunes and rhythms that you could urge from a single pair of shoes were melded and woven into a tapestry of moving sound that grabbed the emotions of every person there. The students walked their beats to perfection, forming a living web of young figures from which arose that wonderful intertwined sound. Everyone tells me that symphony was a miracle. I usually just shrug, but I know better. Afterwards, that's when the real miracle happened. And it was such a small thing. You see, George pounded me on the back, and said, "I did it, didn't I? No one will forget this." And I looked at him, pondered a moment, and answered, "You're right, George. De trill of de feet was great!" He leaned back, and I thought he was going to hit me for a moment. Then the corners of his mouth started to wiggle, then slid up and up. And that's when I learned George could smile, after all. --