Sunday

Names, Shmames


Misunderstanding song lyrics and movie dialogue has a long tradition in our family. Recently a misunderstanding merged the two genres. Grace is a huge musicphile. She likes to set up different classical music for Jack to listen to during his nap time and is fairly systematic about it. Though Jack doesn't listen to music during every nap, Grace will introduce a new piece to him and then play only that piece for several weeks before starting a new piece. Yes I know, she's a better home school mom than I am. This summer it was Tchiakovsky's 1812 Overture. Evidently Grace peaked Jack's interest in it by explaining about Napoleon's siege of Moscow in very dramatic terms. Jack fell in love with it immediately.

After a week or so into listening to the overture I was putting Jack down for his nap and he asked to listen to the "Monster" music. I couldn't figure out at first what he meant until he showed me the CD box. "Monster" music, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, whatever. I set it up for him. We got used to Jack calling it that though we didn't understand why. I thought that he was perhaps imagining Napoleon's troops as monsters. One day Luke walked through Jack's room during nap time and came out laughing. Jack had asked Luke to turn on the "Monster" music, and when Luke didn't know what that was Jack explained very slowly, "You know, Wachowski's music, the music that Mike Wachowski wrote about the bad guys attacking the city". Who knew animated characters were that, well, 3- dimensional?

Later, I lay down next to Jack and asked him to explain what was going on in the music. Did you know that at the end of the overture what you might have mistook for cannon fire is actually the sound of the good guys chasing the bad guys away from the front door with whips?





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