Class Party

This morning, the last day of school before the holiday break, I left the house before seven to rush and buy cookies, milk and eggnog for my students. For various reasons having to do with my own snobbish vanity, I am incapable of buying cheap, lousy stuff, so I spent $60 on fancy cookies with the word 'chunk' in their names. Got to school and set out the diabetic's- nightmare-of-a buffet as the kids flooded in.

I opened iTunes on my computer and set it to play random music from the vast mishmash of tunes in my library. It was a few minutes after that that the earthy, raunchy tones of Bessie Smith rang out, singing 'Empty Bed Blues' for all she was worth, and I overheard one boy tell another it was Ella Fitzgerald. An immediate sense of outrage washed over me, and I couldn't help correcting him. He insisted that they sounded the same. I pointed out that they sounded about as much alike as Mendelssohn and Metallica, but I could tell he was convinced that they were sonic twins, and that was that in his mind. Teenagers—gotta love 'em.