Field Trip

I'd begged off going on this field trip originally. I had expected to be in a new, full time job at this juncture, and you don't ask the boss to take off for such things in your first week or two. At least I don't.

It was a good break from sending resumes over assorted transoms.

And Mo had fun making faces in the driver's mirror.



Paul Mesner Puppets were first up. They were doing Anansi the Spider. Well, before we got on the bus, the teacher read us an Anansi folk tale from an illustrated children's book.

This ain't Dr. Zeus. In the book, Anansi is tricking a turtle into catching a fish for him. In the end, the story goes that what he learned from the turtle about making nets wasn't wasted, that it's how spiders learned to make webs. After the book was closed I asked the teacher if I could teach the kids a two dollar word, and he obliged.



"Deconstructionism," I told the class. "That's when a story is told to give an explanation to something else. Especially something no one can really explain or where the straight explanation is boring."



I know this isn't quite a Wikipedia entry on the term, but it's a decent fourth grade working definition. Fourth graders haven't been completely blighted by the cultural politics, so the kind of definition you'll get Googling it wouldn't make any sense to them. Anyway, the definition seemed to sit well enough with them, and they even repeated the term when the teacher asked them to, and hopefully forgot it by the time we were on the bus.




In the play, Anansi tries to hustle what I gather is the Ashanti equivalent of Zeus, and in the process has to try to bait a snake who eats bananas.

Like I say, it's not Dr. Zeus.

Aside from a spider who's a con artist, I had problems with this kind of stuff even when I was a kid. The first bait Anansi uses on the snake is an egg, and I can buy that. I've heard of snakes eating eggs. But when the snake figures out how to get the egg without getting roped in, Anansi puts a couple of bananas in a pit and greases the rim of it.



What the hell kind of snake eats bananas? I know we're in fairy tale land here, but that's a departure I just can't quite take. I guess it's no weirder than a rabbit who brings eggs on Easter or a fairy that pays American currency for baby teeth.

What's worse, none of my pictures of the cool puppets turned out because they wouldn't let you use flash and my little pocket camera just couldn't overcome the combination of low light and action. Every single photo is blurred, even with the ISO maxed out and the aperture cranked.

Oh well.



I think Mo had her problems with the play, too, based on the amount of time she spent groaning and trying to get me to tickle her. But she did good. And Paul Mesner might not be Jim Henson, but I thought there were three or four people doing puppets and voices and it turned out to be two. Oh, and there was a guy on percussion, but we could see him.

From there we went to do Math at the Mall. Which is really just the Adequate Mall with a worksheet. We ate lunch, which I had packed for me and Mo because I'm presently employed as a bum. The food court is expensive, so I figured I'd stop the bleeding at charging $3.20 for two sodas. We had pepperoni sandwiches, kosher dills and oranges, so not a bad lunch. And it turned out to be a good thing because long waits in line aren't really Mo's forte, and I saw a woman waiting at the A&W when we sat down to eat, and she was just sitting down after we finished, cleaned up, and went to find out what the math thing was all about.

The math questions were all word problems. And they were ridiculous. Steve & Barry's doesn't sell shoes, and nothing there costs more than eight bucks or something, so a word problem with $100 shoes from Steve & Barry's is like a snake being tempted by a greased banana pit.



We did see Zoltar. From Big.

Mo wasn't having word problems, she was having a problem with the mall itself. For one thing, Foozles is closed but they didn't have their gate fully shut. They had a help wanted sign up for their reopening, and while I was trying to get the attention of one of the people on the other side of the gate (because I might need to be moonlighting even when I get a position), Mo just crawled under it and ran amok.

She also wanted ice cream. Which wasn't impossible: there was a Dippin' Dots and some other kids were getting stuff from it, but I had no legal tender, only plastic. Dippin' Dots had a 'cash only' sign.



And she wanted to ride the banana planes. The artist formerly known as Jeepers, now Zonkers, was even involved in some of the word problems Mo wouldn't do. You can go in and look around for free, but the rides cost. Mo's birthday is in a couple weeks, and I tried to take her to Jeepers last year to find the windows soaped up and the place closed, so this year I'll take her there if I have to rob a bank. But really, I couldn't spend that kind of money today.

We walked the mall, something we do. Then we walked it again. And it was still 45 minutes until time to meet for the bus.

I was out of ideas and Mo had a ready supply of tears. The last half hour or so, I periodically asked her if it helped to cry about it, and the only response I got was 'bananaplane.'



Damn.

I even tried taking her picture and showing her how sad she looked. Usually showing her a picture of herself will provide some cheer, but not this time.