>>> Item number 12690 from WRITERS LOG9305C --- (118 records) ---- <<< Date: Thu, 20 May 1993 11:09:36 JST Reply-To: WRITERS Sender: WRITERS From: Mike Barker Subject: SUB: Toe-Tapping Tunes For Jim and anyone else - the "toon shoes" piece. Enjoy. (Randy - I just realized, in revising this the last time I used your phrase! Thanks!) mike ----------------------------- Toe-Tapping Tunes Mike Barker 1020 words I never knew George could smile until the symphony. He was a nice guy, but too serious. He thought none of us took music seriously enough. He was scared, too. He had every intention of being a major composer, known around the world. He was also almost twenty-one. He knew that every major composer had made his mark long before reaching that age. When the tone shoe hit the market, and everyone started chirping through the student center, I saw 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! George suffered as the college halls came alive with the sounds of musical shoes, clashing. Then someone sold the army on it, with music selected by the General Staff playing while they marched. I think that's what put George onto his idea. Watching the ROTC boys march in step, boots kicking out the sounds, the fellows in back drumming, the ones in front bugling, well, it was a real marching band. George started recruiting around the music school. Pretty soon some profs 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. 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. One of the big outfits from the west coast offered a video contract, but when nobody could figure out who it should be with, that fell through. By then, George was running practices constantly. When I talked to him, his eyes slowly nodded, although I couldn't tell if he was nodding in time to his own dreams of the symphony or just falling asleep. He started with music students, but teaching them to walk with the right steps to make the shoes sound off when he wanted them to was tough. Getting music students to walk repeatedly, for long periods, with changes in step took time, and lots of patience - they all knew about practice, but were used to somewhat less energetic methods. They also wanted to press keys, finger valves, or do something to affect the music, while all George wanted them to do was step in time. 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. The dance students found George on the practice field and posed the question. Did George care if the instruments 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, put on some of the spare shoes and walked through a simple intersecting path. George yelled at them to do it again. He stepped 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. That's what's missing, and it's too late!" Then he grabbed his score and started scribbling madly on the back of it, tears rolling down his cheeks. 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. But he didn't think there would be enough time to practice the new patterns. When the big day came, half the city skipped work to see it. 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. As the symphony developed, the web spread out and embraced the audience, ringing them in sounds, moving them as part of one enormous living instrument that sounded across the city and into the T.V. cameras. Faces smiled, arms linked, and George's patterns swelled from the stepping shoes in thematic splendor. Then as the symphony came to its completion, the web gathered again in the center, drawing the music and the motion into a final aching moment of musical shoes walking underneath exuberant youth. When they finished, there was a long, resonant silence. Then the T.V. crews started to clap and cheer, followed by the entire gathered audience. The applause went on, and swept George's tone shoe symphony into history. Everyone tells me that symphony was a miracle. I usually just shrug, but I know better. Afterwards, that's when the real miracle happened. It was such a small thing, too. You see, George pounded me on the back, and said, "I did it, didn't I? No one will forget this." 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. -----------------------------------------